by Paul Cornell
‘I got ambushed by a bunch of this lot, took me out with an electrical stunner, I think it was.’ He paused to run his tongue round his teeth and wince. ‘Not clear about what happened next. I think a couple of them must have hauled me down into the hull, where . . .’ He paused to control his breathing. ‘You’ve seen this lot. Swastikas and shit. They thought they had time to take it out on me. One of them held me while the other went to work. Fucking deluded. The armed officers burst in and I was hoping they’d drop one of them, but no, they were good as gold, hands in the air, on their knees, and I wasn’t in any state to take advantage.’
‘That’s so weird, that they’d take the time to do that. It’s almost like you were the target.’
‘Yeah. So why not you and all?’
‘You don’t recognize any of this lot, do you?’
‘No. Believe me, I’ve taken a long hard look.’
‘You should get yourself looked over by the FME, check you’re OK.’
Costain shook his head. ‘I want to finish the operation. I want to take this ship apart, make sure we haven’t missed anything.’
Sefton’s glance darted over to Ross, then back to Costain. ‘Listen—’
‘Quill’s not going to think to bloody stop me unless you get him to. So don’t, OK? I need . . . I need to keep working.’
Sefton couldn’t bring himself to argue. He put his hand on Costain’s shoulder, where he was pretty sure it wouldn’t hurt him, then went over to join Ross and Quill. Ross was looking at her phone, hands still in evidence gloves, comparing a picture to the corpse on deck. Sefton wanted to say they should all be gathered together, but seeing the look on Ross’s face, he recalled again the enormity of what Costain had done to her and felt like he’d just walked across the deck from one end of a seesaw to the other. It wasn’t that she wasn’t feeling for Costain, he was sure; it was that she didn’t like how much she was. ‘What have you got?’ he asked.
‘I got his name and occupation from his passport, then checked IMDb. This guy is Erik Gullister, sixty-eight years old, a professional actor, been in loads of stuff on US television, everything from Castle to Sons of Anarchy to E.R., back in the day. I searched for his name in the Dutch media, and, if Google translation is close enough, when he was abducted, he seems to have been in a season of theatrical events staged at seaside locations. No starring roles, no recurring characters, not since the 1970s, when he was the lead in a couple of short-lived series. Problems with drugs, dealing as well as possession, a couple of arrests, according to Google. But he’s still one of those guys who’s been in so much that you know his face but not his name. It strikes me also that three of these five victims had criminal records, but not Lassiter and obviously not Holmes—’
Quill interrupted her, insisting again. ‘Did he ever live in London?!’
‘He doesn’t seem to have worked here, and . . . Here we go – his passport isn’t stamped for the UK. This is his first visit to London. Why is that important?’
Quill just shook his head, visibly relieved.
‘But listen,’ Ross continued, ‘here’s the most important thing. One credit leaps out at you.’ She scrolled down the screen and pointed.
Sefton was looking over her shoulder now too. ‘Sherlock Holmes,’ he said. He called Costain, who made his way over as quickly as he could and looked at the screen incredulously.
‘He was the lead in American Sherlock for six episodes in 1978,’ said Ross.
‘Bates played Holmes too,’ said Sefton. ‘You said he was Sherlock in that school play.’
‘And Lassiter had been an actor,’ said Quill.
Ross looked it up on her phone. ‘With the lead in a touring Hound of the Baskervilles.’
Costain’s face showed the sudden copper pleasure of seeing a connection materialize. ‘I’m betting if we ask Duleep’s family if he ever played Sherlock Holmes, in an amateur production or something, they’ll say yes.’
‘This,’ said Ross, ‘is why the differences in the murders are indicative. Killer or killers are willing to alter, within boundaries, how close they get to the original location, and will compensate for that with other details, because the one thing they absolutely need, the one thing they’ll sacrifice other aspects in order to achieve, is this: their victims must have played Sherlock Holmes.’
ELEVEN
Quill got home before midnight. He’d called Lofthouse and briefed her about the results of the raid, got the paperwork sorted, including decent arrangements for the victim. No grieving widow, but there were some grown-up children. No comfort to them that their father wasn’t in Hell. Quill had made sure the crew were, as he’d always done it, put in separate cell corridors, so they couldn’t get their stories sorted between them.
He’d realized in the car that he should have ordered Costain to go and get his injuries checked out. The sergeant had taken a first-aid kit from one of Petrovski’s lot and had retreated into a corner like a wounded animal, to deal with some minor cuts and bruises on his face. He’d still been staggering when he got back to the others, refusing to admit to how much he’d been hurt, not wanting, maybe, to look weak in front of Ross.
The face of that actor kept coming back to Quill: old and lost, not knowing why this had been done to him. He’d been escorted from his hotel room; they’d found out, got into the back of a car all smiles and laughter. What had they said to him? We’re such fans of yours. We know all about your work. Listen as we reel off our research. Whoever was behind this knew exactly who to hire: not just professionals, but ones that fitted the Conan Doyle story. What enormous organization would it take to fund and carry out something like this, and with such a precise and eccentric aim?
As Quill drove, he kept finding his attention drawn to the rear-view mirror. It was, he realized, like last time. Was he being followed? He never saw the same car, but he kept jerking his head up, hoping to catch one, like it leaped back into the mirror every time he looked away. He pulled up in front of his house in Enfield, switched off the lights and engine, and sat there without getting out, still looking in the mirror. He kept expecting some vehicle, some something, to come round the corner at the end of the close. Once again, there was a feeling of something hanging back.
He got out of the car and stared into the dark, his breath billowing around him. He took a step towards the darkness on the corner, then waited, hoping to hear a reaction. ‘Hello?’ he called. No response. He heard a noise, a definite noise, and was suddenly running, was at the corner in seconds, saw a change in the shadow as he reached it . . . and found Mrs Epton putting out her recycling.
‘Evening,’ he said, breathing a bit too hard. ‘Did you see anyone else pass by, in just this last minute or so?’
Mrs Epton, looking nervous at why he was asking, said she hadn’t, and then he asked again if she was certain, and now he felt sure that she was looking nervous because of him.
He stayed outside for a while, wondering if the feeling of being watched would come back. It didn’t, and he finally went inside. Sarah would already be in bed and asleep, and he could hear Jessica snoring. He took out his phone, and making himself not think twice, he called Laura. She’d probably be awake. Indeed, she answered after two rings. ‘What can I do for you at this time of night, James?’ Her voice, to him, always sounded deliberately soft, like she was consciously trying to cut out the masculine sounds. That apparent carefulness had always charmed him. It was how priests should sound, how he wanted everyone to sound.
He made himself sound calm in return. ‘Just something I wanted to have a chat with you about. Listen, are you sure you want to move to London?’
‘Well, yeah. I’ve got interviews lined up. Why do you ask?’
‘It’s just . . . things aren’t great here these days.’
‘I’m a big girl.’ Indeed, he’d seen her get abuse on the street that had amazed him. She insisted on going to football and walking wherever she wanted to, which resulted in repeated verbal abuse, and on som
e occasions physical attacks too. She lived a life the harshness of which would be difficult to get most people to believe. What could he say to her to put her off London?
‘I . . . can’t tell you why, but I’m serious. There’s an enormous threat to . . . I’m calling people I, you know, people I care about.’
‘Christ, is it a nuclear bomb or something? I’m not moving for weeks. It’s not like . . . What about Sarah and Jess?’
‘I . . . I haven’t told them.’
‘You’ve had a warning about some sort of terrorist threat and . . . ?!’
‘No. Nothing like that. They’re not in danger.’ If only that was true. ‘This is a problem purely for . . .’
‘For people like me?’
This had all gone too fast for him to do anything but react, but OK, that would do. ‘Yeah.’
There was silence at the other end of the line for a moment. Then she spoke again. ‘You’re telling me there’s been some sort of serious long-term threat made against transsexuals in London?’
Quill found that he couldn’t lie about the job. He really should have written down what he was going to say. ‘Well, no . . .’
‘I can keep your name out of it, but if there’s been a threat, there are people I need to tell, to make the community aware of what’s going on. Why haven’t we been told officially? Are they even planning to do that? Who are we talking about? Some extreme religious group?’
What could he say? There was nothing he could say. He had to say something. ‘It’s nothing anyone in authority knows about. It’s probably just me being paranoid.’
‘James, please!’
He felt as if the muscles down the back of his neck had locked. He wanted to tell her everything, but that would mean telling her more than he’d told Sarah. That would mean telling Sarah.
After a moment’s silence, she took pity on him. ‘Listen, when I come down, you’re going to tell me everything about this, all right?’
‘Could you . . . could you please not come down?’ He didn’t know how long a stay would be counted as ‘living in London’.
There was a long silence now. Quill recognized it. He was about to say something again, perhaps to apologize, when she spoke up once more, and now she was extremely calm and precise. ‘Don’t tell me to be a coward, OK? Not when you won’t tell me what the threat is. I live with this every day.’
He tried to back down, to say it was probably nothing. She tried a couple more times to get him to tell her what was going on. ‘Are you OK?’ she asked, finally. ‘I mean, is there anything . . . wrong?’ With you, she could have added. No, that was unfair.
‘Of course not. Look, it’s late . . .’ He tried to downplay it now, made jokes, tried to talk about the football. She was having none of it. He eventually broke down and angrily, desperately, asked her to not say anything about this conversation to Sarah. Laura, now completely lost and very worried, agreed, but like she was going to keep to that.
Quill finally put the phone down and found he was shaking. He wanted to do what someone in the movies did now: drink; smash something; punch the wall and not go immediately to casualty. He was confined by the rules of the world only he knew about, which he didn’t fully understand. He sat down, not wanting to go upstairs, thinking of Hell, back in it.
TWELVE
Lofthouse had kept the papers and the gun in her briefcase at home, and had not so much as looked at them, not so much as moved the case. When she’d got into her office at the Hill on the first morning of Quill’s team’s planning for the Lone Star raid, she first made herself check in about the progress of current investigations. She’d discovered, among other things, that the walls of the nick that had been dusted for prints had found only a few, all identified as being from police officers and suspects who’d been in those corridors. That had been a long shot in any case. Someone who’d planned so meticulously to have Quill’s team bring a victim to where they needed to be would surely have taken the trouble to wear gloves. Finally, she told her assistant she wasn’t to see anyone or take any calls, and had opened her briefcase and inspected what she’d found.
The gun was indeed a functional shotgun, double-barrelled, in the ‘over and under’ fashion, one barrel atop the other. Lofthouse came from a farming family and knew a little about such weapons. The top barrel was inscribed ‘J. Purdey and Sons, London’ in gold inlay. That was a firm she had actually heard of, which, this being presumably an item from Quill’s side of the curtain, came as a bit of a surprise. The gun had been kept in great condition. The metal of the barrels was patterned, a very fine finish like the wings of a butterfly. It didn’t look to be a matter of engraving, but something about the metal itself. Lofthouse wished she could look it up on the Internet, but her every keystroke would be looked at and thought about. A very London gun, certainly, but was that all there was to it? She checked the chambers and found that each was loaded. Oh, terrific, she’d kept a bloody loaded shotgun in her briefcase as she’d jolted along.
Carefully, she removed the cartridges. Now, these looked like nothing she’d ever seen before. They seemed to be made of soft white paper, with something that made a shaking noise inside, a metal cap on one end that bore no inscription. Could these even work in a shotgun? With no supply of ammunition, unless she wanted to covertly buy some normal cartridges, two shots were all she had. So practice was out of the question. Whatever was in these was designed to take down . . . something. There was no way she was going to be able to find out what.
She put the shotgun back in the drawer, the cartridges beside it, and turned her attention to the papers. She wished she’d had more time in the apartment. She was sure she’d have found many other useful things. Instead, she had the contents of one locked drawer, which was what the key had regarded as the most important thing, and the safe.
The papers had clearly been kept folded for many years – they unfolded with reluctance, and the folds left white lines across what was revealed. It was a diagram, drawn in ink by a brush, wavy lines going across the page, then splitting, like the branches of a tree, until several of them, further down the page, led to a big circle. It reminded her distantly of a calligraphy exercise, but there was no writing of any kind. Lofthouse held the page up to the light to see any sign of invisible ink, but there was none. This was what the key had regarded as most significant, but she had no idea, as with the gun, what the piece of paper was for, what it might mean. Apart, that was, from one immediate and obvious deduction. ‘You’re a map,’ she said out loud. ‘But to what?’
The morning after the Lone Star raid, Ross got into the Portakabin before anyone else. Listening to the radio on the way in had been an education in how the media adjusted a narrative. They were now reporting the ‘Sherlock murders’ as if they never had been the ‘Study in Scarlet murders’. Although the news organizations had made the connection that Erik Gullister had played Holmes, they didn’t yet know that about the other victims. Also, they seemed to think the suspects in custody now were fancied for the earlier murders too, a perception that would probably vanish before lunchtime, when it became clear they hadn’t been in the UK at the time. Duleep’s family had confirmed he had indeed once played Sherlock Holmes in a local amateur dramatic production.
The money trail to the company called Missing Room had gone cold in a Swiss bank. To buy and rename a ship took a lot of money, but it had already become clear that whoever they were playing against had power in the material world. They’d put together a team that had included the striking individual who had killed Bates, the mercenaries on the ship and Dean Michael, if that was his real name. Who knew how many others?
She was about to start rebuilding the ops board when she heard a sound behind her. Costain had entered. He still looked bruised about the face. Normally these days he’d come in late, to make sure they weren’t alone. Oh God, was he going to try some new tactic to get past her guard?
‘I’m going to put myself at your service,’ he said, without even
a good morning. ‘We could try to put it all right.’
‘If you mean you and me—’
‘No, I mean what’s most wrong with your life.’
‘You’re talking about helping me get back my future happiness?’
He nodded.
‘Yeah, OK, listen, I’m not some sort of prize, where you work hard on my behalf and then earn the right to shag me.’
Costain’s expression remained surprisingly stoic. ‘What happened to me down there . . .’ He meant inside the ship. ‘They hated me, Lisa. There was nothing more to them than that. All I could think about while they were on me . . . I wanted to come back out into the light and . . . I just want to come back into the light, OK?’
It was entirely possible that he might come up with some useful idea about how to get her happiness back, considering all the dodgy contacts he had. That usefulness would still be there even if he couldn’t live up to his fine sentiments, which was obviously going to turn out to be the case. The next auction of occult London items, when those in the know traditionally gathered to bid cash or barter for objects of power, was on 23 September, the autumn equinox. The auction house now owned Ross’s future happiness. They had taken it from her in the form of a liquid and presumably bottled it. She’d sold it to them in return for a chance to get her dad out of Hell. Costain had fucked that up, but Ross had always been planning on going to the next auction, to see if the house was immediately going to sell it on. She’d imagined pleading with whoever bought it, or following them, grabbing it from them . . . but those had been useless dreams. With Costain on her side, she’d have more force to put towards the second course of action, more guile to put towards the first. But still . . .
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
Sefton entered and pointed at Costain. He looked like he’d just been struck by a terrifying idea. ‘Have you,’ he said, ‘ever played Sherlock Holmes?’
