Who Killed Sherlock Holmes?

by Paul Cornell

  ‘Oh, well then, case closed!’ said Costain. Ross was amazed he was talking back to her. Pleased, honestly. Maybe they could work together after all. ‘Listen, can you imagine our first victim, Christopher Lassiter, even if he was the most un-racist person on earth, answering the door to complete stranger Albie Bates and then immediately having a cuppa with him? Albie doesn’t have the gift of the gab.’

  Quill had been listening, looking increasingly frustrated. ‘Not a good fit, I grant you, but maybe he forced his way in, ordered the victim to make a cup of tea.’

  ‘Instead of grabbing his DVD player and running?’ asked Costain. ‘Come on, what’s in it for Bates? Why leave a word on the wall that isn’t in his vocabulary? Bates isn’t who did this; Bates is who gets sent down for it when they can’t find anyone else, and you know it. Is that what we do now?’

  Quill looked for a moment like he was going to bellow at Costain, had to visibly control himself. ‘Of course it isn’t.’

  ‘So,’ said Sefton, moving on, ‘if we assume Bates is innocent, we should focus on this guy, our new prime suspect.’ He pointed to a piece of paper on the board with only a name written on it. ‘Dean Michael. If he’s real, he could have used the same item, gesture or sound to hide himself from the prison authorities and to create, on that CCTV camera, and possibly for anyone watching, the illusion that he was Bates. That’s well within the bounds of what we know to be possible. We didn’t see anything of the Sight about Bates on the ladder, but we’ve seen that people in the know can hide from us.’

  ‘The name Dean Michael isn’t in the databases,’ said Ross. ‘Google offers a number of individuals called that from around the world, but none with any of the indicators associated with our line of work or with London.’

  ‘Say he’s pretending to be in the prison system,’ said Costain, ‘to set Bates up, which, if you can walk through walls, wouldn’t be that hard to do. Individual prison officers see inmates come and go all the time – they don’t know who’s supposed to be in the mess hall unless they’re called upon to make a count – and as a remand prisoner, he’d be in his own clothes.’

  ‘He didn’t use this “walkthrough” to enter either of the first two crime scenes,’ said Quill. ‘Just at 221B.’

  ‘Because, in the first case, he had to obtain the victim’s trust to use the poison. In the second case . . . well, Lisa noted that means of entry was bizarre. What if he did it that way in order to get his illusion seen by the CCTV camera, in order to fit up Bates?’

  Quill nodded. ‘Let’s get Bates in here with the PRO-FIT software, get a photofit of Dean Michael we can show around.’ He called Clarke’s office again and requested that Bates be brought over to the Hill tonight, so they could interview him in the morning. ‘Another long day,’ he said. ‘We’ll leave it there for now.’

  Ross tried to hang about, after Sefton and Costain left, to have a word in private with Quill. He’d done so much for her in the past. Whatever he was dealing with on his own, she wanted to help. When Quill saw her hanging back, however, he just tossed her the keys and curtly told her to lock up, then was away to his own car. Ross watched him go. She wondered if there was something somewhere in Quill’s life that might give him a lead on what was weighing him down. She hoped desperately that he could find it.

  Since getting the Sight, Quill had found the drive home from work really bloody difficult. He’d put the radio on, try to screen out the horrors London offered. Sticking to the same route had, to a degree, made those horrors routine, but only to a degree. He would always wave, for instance, to the same forlorn figure standing in the graveyard near his home. Lately, he’d been making himself do it, because after Hell, he had to make himself do so many small, routine things.

  Tonight, however, the drive home was different. It took him a while to feel it, through the thoughts about Laura and Sarah and Jessica that he kept rolling round and round in his head. He gradually became aware that the Sight was trying to tell him about something. Something was behind him, occasionally to one side. He looked in the mirror, couldn’t see anything unusual. The feeling persisted all the way home. He parked outside his house, locked the car, then hesitated for a new reason, looked slowly around the leafy housing estate close.

  The Sight was giving him a strangely generalized warning. It was very vague, on the edge of being nothing, close to the anxiety that these days infested his every waking moment. He found he was looking at the corner at the end of the close, the pavement in the longer shadows of approaching autumn. He thought yet again, as he looked, of the pavements he’d tramped in Hell. He tried yet again, as he often did, to take comfort in the mere existence of physical objects around him, in being basically comfortable and free from pain, in the weather, even. They were all just sheets draped over what was true. Was that shadow on the corner getting longer? Was someone standing just around there? Quill watched and waited. Eventually, he became uncertain. The length of the shadow had changed with the light.

  ‘Quill?’ That was Sarah, standing at the door, Jessica in her arms. ‘What’s going on?’

  He shook his head, turned to her with a broad and artificial smile. ‘The great detective was lost in thought.’ He went and kissed Jessica, and made to go into the house, but just before he went inside, he looked back again and was still unsure.

  ‘You know,’ he said, so, so casually, as he and Sarah made dinner together, ‘I think we should try and talk Laura out of coming to live in London.’ He hadn’t rehearsed this. This was nerve-wracking, on the edge of disaster.

  ‘I know what you mean,’ said Sarah. ‘What with all you’ve told me, all that’s happened to us. But we’re doing OK, aren’t we? The people who don’t know about this stuff are doing OK too.’

  ‘“OK”?!’ Quill felt his heart suddenly racing, had to breathe deeper. ‘You think what happened to me is “doing OK”?!’

  Sarah stopped, put down what she was doing, nervously wondered how she should reply.

  He hated seeing her like that. He took those deep breaths, calmed down. ‘Sorry,’ he whispered.

  ‘It’s all right.’ She came over and put her arms round him. ‘Quill, I just want to help. Please let me help.’

  He disengaged himself. He had to get to his point. ‘I meant that it’s probably going to get worse. It’d be irresponsible to let Laura move down if, you know, that smiling bastard’s going to start something. We don’t know what his big plan is.’

  She knew he was keeping something back from her. ‘Quill, she’s never going to believe it. Even if I back you up. She’ll think we’re mad.’

  He suddenly had to control his breathing again. He went to lean on the fridge.

  ‘Quill, please, I know you don’t want to talk about it—’

  He quickly straightened up. ‘Another great detective moment, love. Moving swiftly on . . .’

  ‘Please—’

  ‘Can I try to tell you about my work? Can I please just try to bloody do that?’ He was overreacting again. He couldn’t help it. He hated not being able to help it. Something inside him kept trying to make that her fault. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘You can tell me anything. You know that, don’t you?’

  He shook his head, ignored what those words had done to him. ‘Like I said, moving on. Sharing something from work. Let me put a question to you directly, see what you reckon, just the first thing that comes into your head?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Who killed Sherlock Holmes?’

  ‘Arthur Conan Doyle. He killed him off in the stories, because he was fed up with only being known for writing that one character. Are you going to tell me what that’s about?’

  He did. Tons and tons of it, feeling some relief at being able to share at least something about his work life, in the way he’d become used to since getting the Sight. Every detail, though, felt like it might lull him into weakness, into telling Sarah what he must not tell her, about that sign over the entrance to Hell. ‘Conan Doyle,’ he said. �
��You know, that’s not a bad idea. He might be remembered by London too.’

  They went to bed. Sarah went to sleep and Quill pretended to.

  The phone call came what felt like a few minutes after Quill had fallen into a troubled sleep, but from the clock it was more like two hours. He scrabbled for the bedside phone and heard Ross’s voice on the end of the line, and what she was saying made him slowly stumble up and start finding his clothes.

  He got to Gipsy Hill around 4 a.m. The nick was in lockdown, and it took him a while to get through the added security to the cell where a boy he took to be Albie Bates lay half on the floor and half across a bunk, his spine arched, his mouth set in a grimace, his eyes staring. Around the body crouched the crime scene examiners, and in the corridor outside, Costain, Sefton and Ross, furious, incredulous. Costain was walking back and forth, his face an angry mask. Behind them, on the wall that led, through a couple of empty cells, to the exterior wall, was chalked the shape of a very small door.

  Costain caught Quill’s glance. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘Bates was probably telling the truth.’

  Quill felt like kicking that chalk shape. He had to will himself not to do so. ‘How did he die?’

  ‘Strychnine poisoning,’ said one of the CSEs, straightening up. ‘I’ll need to do tests, but I’ve seen it before. Administered by . . .’ She pointed to just above the boy’s right ear, where something long and dark was sticking out of the skin. ‘Looks like a thorn of some kind.’

  ‘So was it pressed into him by someone standing out here, or . . . ?’

  ‘I’m betting it was fired by a blowpipe,’ said Ross. ‘Because that’s the murder method in the next Sherlock Holmes book after A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four.’

  They all took a moment. They looked at each other, lost. The CSE, judging that this was their private burden, stepped discreetly back into the cell.

  ‘So did they just use this MO because they wanted to shut him up?’ asked Sefton. ‘OK, so someone’s killing people not just like the murders in A Study in Scarlet but continuing into the other Holmes books, meaning that nothing was written on the wall in this case. But if the location the murders take place, at least near to where they happen in the books, was important for the first two—’

  ‘That’s the worst thing,’ said Ross. She held up her phone and showed them a Google map with many pins in it. ‘Conan Doyle fans made this map of the locations used in the stories. In The Sign of Four, Bartholomew Sholto is killed by poison dart at his home, Pondicherry Lodge. The book doesn’t give a street address, but it’s in Upper Norwood.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Quill.

  ‘This is the nearest police station. Not only is our killer continuing to murder people in ways that copy the Holmes stories, they just used us to do it.’

  EIGHT

  Rebecca Lofthouse felt awkward to be in the company of Quill and his team again. Now more than ever, she had to keep her poker face on at all times, to not give away to these people she’d come to trust the dangerous adventure she’d been on. If her husband . . . if whatever had possessed her husband . . . could walk into her communications devices, then he could certainly access theirs. Indeed, if she were him, any sign that she’d told this team what was going on would be the first thing she’d look for.

  As soon as she got into the station that morning, she got Quill to brief her on the murder in custody and swiftly got him access to the CCTV recordings of the cell corridor. The small chalked doorways did indeed also appear in the empty cells that led to the exterior wall, and on the inside of that wall. There was a matching one on the outside too. The suspect hadn’t bothered to erase it.

  ‘Here we go again,’ she said to him as they gathered round the monitor, thinking back to when Mora Losley had invaded Gipsy Hill. The team fast-forwarded the video to the point where they told her they could see a figure in the corridor, then halted it and exclaimed about the nature of the shape.

  ‘Wait a sec,’ said Lofthouse. ‘I can see it too.’

  They compared notes. They were seeing exactly the same thing. The suspect was not a creature only visible by the Sight. It was a male, who looked to be of subcontinental descent, of very short stature, dressed in a sort of tribal outfit.

  ‘As in the book, ma’am,’ said Ross, sounding as astonished as Lofthouse felt. The footage showed Bates asleep as the suspect walked up to his cell. The figure bent to aim his blowpipe, then fired. Bates jerked, convulsed, made what must have been choked attempts to cry out. The small figure, his work done, walked out of frame. They checked the cameras outside the nick. They showed the suspect approaching, looking around to see he wasn’t being observed, then producing a stick of chalk, drawing it on the wall and walking through it. Lofthouse felt that, without the Sight, she shouldn’t have been able to see anybody walking through anything, and said so.

  ‘Makes sense if you think about it, ma’am,’ said Costain. ‘If we freeze-framed on the moment of him going through, then maybe you’d get a headache looking at it, or couldn’t see the moment of impossibility, but what are you actually seeing there that requires the Sight? Nothing. First the bloke’s there; then he isn’t.’

  ‘That fucker,’ said Costain, with some passion, ‘is visible to everybody. How the fuck did he get across the car park without anyone seeing him, looking like that?’

  ‘Maybe he doesn’t look like that, really,’ said Sefton. ‘We were working on the theory that it wasn’t Bates who climbed up that ladder, but someone else, creating an illusion of Bates. An illusion the main investigation could see as well as us. Perhaps that’s what happened here too.’

  ‘No,’ said Ross. She was looking professionally angry, like she hated this puzzle being beyond her, even perhaps hated not having anticipated this. ‘Think about the size of the chalk doorway. Only someone really that small could fit through it. So either we assume the suspect has the power to change size also, which is a seriously groundless assumption, or we’re looking at a team of some kind, a team that actually includes a . . . small blowpipe bloke. Why does he even look like the killer from the story, anyway? The killer didn’t have to last time.’

  ‘Maybe the fuckers are trying for as much authentic detail as possible,’ said Sefton, ‘except when something else is more important. For the first murder, they had to gain the victim’s trust; for the second one, they were setting up Bates; this time, they were able to go to town. Or maybe what was written on the wall provided enough authenticity on those two occasions, and this time they had to find that in other ways, such as . . . employing a small assassin of indigenous origin.’

  ‘He has got to be on a database somewhere,’ said Costain.

  They searched on their phones, there and then, because the search terms were so easy. Lofthouse watched that hope crumble. There was nobody on the police databases resembling the suspect, and only two such people on the books as actors, even, neither of whom looked at all like the killer.

  ‘Damn it,’ said Ross, switching off her phone. ‘We just have a cloud of data points right now. I can’t call any of it intel, because we haven’t made step one towards processing it.’

  They checked the exterior CCTV. Frustratingly, there was no camera that precisely covered the angles leading to that stretch of wall. They went outside and found chalk marks in the shape of a door on both sides of the wire fence, in a darkened corner of the car park where one of the ancient lights had failed. Costain led them along a path between cameras, some of which had also gone out of order and hadn’t been replaced due to the continuing austerity measures. It took them a while, but they finally got to the entry point at the wall.

  ‘That would take a lot of figuring out,’ said Ross. ‘Suspect couldn’t have done it on the night; he must have staked out the station, made notes.’

  Lofthouse ordered that all the walls in question be checked for fingerprints. She realized that normally she would have expected to hear some words of experience from Quill before now, but instead he was stari
ng at the exterior wall, his fingers flexing, frustrated to the point where he radiated pain. She could see his team glancing in his direction too, not wanting to comment in front of her. Ross said she wanted to take the new evidence back to the ops board across the road. Lofthouse agreed.

  As Quill headed out, she held him back. ‘James,’ she asked, ‘what aren’t you telling me?’

  He shook his head, a nervy smile on his face. ‘That’s bloody ironic, eh, ma’am? Tell you what, if you tell me yours, I’ll tell you mine.’ Which was right on the edge of insubordination. But she had to admit he had a point.

  Lofthouse kept in touch with the operation all that day. She put out an all-points warning for a killer with a very distinctive appearance. The new commissioner called her to talk to her about this second death in custody at Gipsy Hill within two years, the call being clearly just a warning shot, with pleasantries throughout. Lofthouse told him that a review of security procedures was already in progress, which was true.

  At the end of the day, she headed home, and saw Peter’s car in the drive. Tensing up, she went into the house and found him in the bedroom, in his dress shirt, putting on his cufflinks, like their life together of thirty years continued as always.

  ‘Hurry up and change,’ he said, his voice still with that edge to it that said someone else was in there. ‘Everything is normal, remember?’

  Christina’s birthday party had a lot of their old friends attending, people from the law-enforcement community, London business-people, Peter’s mates from the City. They mingled in one of the new apartments in the Shard, enormous tanned windows turning even the descending sun into something controlled. Lofthouse wondered distantly if, had the invitation been to somewhere outside of London, Peter would have refused to go. She’d tried that once, at the start, driving him quickly towards the motorway, but he’d calmly produced a Stanley knife and put it to his wrist. Lofthouse would have found it impossible to keep her calm expression tonight, she was sure, except for the fact she was on a mission. Still, she made sure to look a little burdened whenever Peter glanced in her direction.