Who Killed Sherlock Holmes?

by Paul Cornell

  Sefton heard the sound of a distant alarm down the street. The passers-by paid no notice, of course. Was there a Holmes actor they’d missed? It seemed possible, but unlikely. Besides, today, every security guard, no matter what their thespian inclinations, was on alert. He heard another alarm, and another, and another, all from nearby streets, and from this one. The pedestrians were noticing now, laughing and saying things to each other about an earth tremor setting them off. Not likely, but given how nervy Londoners were these days, who’d bet against the foundations of their world starting to shake? Sefton called Ross.

  ‘Whole bunch of alarms going off. Team here thinks it’s some sort of computer worm,’ she said. ‘Costain’s called in. He’s going to run between several of them, see if any of them represents a real situation, because the one at RBS doesn’t. Main team’ – that was the one with Horner: they didn’t want to say anything over the phone that’d indicate they knew his name or building – ‘have nothing to report. You’re to check on the following . . .’ She gave him three potential targets. If this was a feint, it would be good to indicate they were falling for it. Sefton jogged between two banks and a bonds-trading firm, and found, having gone inside and right to the door of the safe in each question, no sign of a chalk door, nothing unusual.

  He was running back towards the Fenchurch Street end of Lombard Street when he became aware that all around him, others were reacting and starting to move in the same direction. The plain-clothes guys, it must be. He felt a buzz from his phone and found a single-word text from Ross: Home. That meant converge on Travail Ltd. By the time he got to Clement’s Lane, he was part of a rush of uniformed and non-uniformed coppers.

  He burst through the doors and was surprised to see Horner standing, his hands raised, puzzled by the attention. ‘Nothing going on down here,’ he said.

  Ross and Clarke entered together, Costain just behind them. ‘But something is upstairs,’ said Clarke, looking at her phone. She led Costain’s team up to the first floor. There, in the large Victorian room, stood the enormous door of the safe, magnificently decorated with brands and commendations. Beside it stood two of the plain-clothes officers who’d been stationed downstairs and a handful of scared bank workers. The door of the safe was slightly open. ‘I . . . heard something from inside,’ one of the bank workers was saying. ‘So I opened it and . . .’

  Sefton went to the safe and opened the door further with the toe of his boot. Inside, not even filling the space, lay the body of a large man, his face turned away. On his head was a deerstalker. On the back wall of the safe was drawn a window-sized chalk square. Costain stepped forwards, having donned evidence gloves, and gingerly removed the deerstalker. The back of the man’s head had been smashed in, leaving a mess of hair, bone, blood and grey matter. The movement made the body fall to one side, and in that moment, they all saw who the victim was: Mark Ballard.

  Sefton had to turn away to restrain himself from kicking at a door that would have definitely injured his foot.

  Dr Piara Singh Deb, forensic pathologist at St Pancras Mortuary, was not willing to be taken for a fool, and so he had promised himself that he would never again deal with DI Quill’s team. This evening, he had been startled, therefore, to find that his boss had done some sort of deal with Detective Superintendent Lofthouse. Every case of theirs was to be brought here until further notice.

  Dr Deb had considered making himself unavailable as a protest, but his boss had taken him aside and said that these were good people, who seemed to be under a lot of stress, and who seemed to have a high regard for Dr Deb’s skills. Dr Deb had remembered how they’d seemed last time. That couldn’t have been acting. They too must have been fooled, at that point, by the, it must be said, incredibly similar corpse that had been provided in place of their friend and leader, James Quill. Surely they too must have been kept in the dark about whatever deep undercover operation had led Quill to pretend to be dead.

  That thought had made him feel rather better about having not been trusted with such secrecy, and so he had scrubbed up and gone down to the labs, and had proceeded to examine this latest corpse. Now, he faced only three of Quill’s team, Quill himself apparently being on leave. He saw what his boss had meant. The intelligence analyst, so stricken with grief last time, now had something cold about her, and there was palpable tension between her and the detective sergeant, who was leading the team.

  ‘Victim,’ he said, ‘was struck on the back of the head several times by a metal implement, smooth and with a sharp point. You can see here how this depression in the brain is created by the point having slipped into the wound. The force used in the attack was considerable, but not wild. There are no wounds anywhere else on the body. This was a deliberate, precise assault. Cause of death was sudden-impact trauma. He’d have been unconscious after the first or second blow, but his position doesn’t seem to have shifted, so he wasn’t in a position to fall. I’d say he must have been tied up, but if he was, there’s no sign of rope marks. Also, there’s something unusual about the musculature. It was stiff long before rigor mortis should have set in, because time of death, from the blood clotting, is only ten minutes or so before the body was found.’ He kept one eye on their reactions, hoping one day to spot something that gave him some clue as to why this team in particular brought him such extraordinary cases. He wanted to ask them what they knew, because it was obvious what he was saying made sense to them, had been expected even, in the way one expects the sky to fall. They had no obligation to answer any such question, unless he had a professional need for the answer. ‘You can still see that rigor on the face: the muscles are tight, as are the leg and arm muscles. I think it’s possible he may have been suffering severe cramp immediately before the attack. No trace of anything unusual in the blood, so that isn’t a result of that tribal poison you mentioned in the notes.’

  ‘Any indications as to nature of assailant?’ asked the analyst.

  ‘Strong, muscles like a sportsman, with a good aim. Taller than the victim, if that muscle locking indicates the victim as somehow standing up.’

  ‘Could he have been held by the others?’

  ‘It’s possible, but it strikes me that to hold someone so still that their muscles protest in this manner would take . . . well, too many people for one person to get such clear access, or, if there were that few, they’d have to be incredibly strong.’

  Once Deb had completed his report, the sergeant thanked him and he watched them go. Perhaps, he decided, he was glad to have in his life the highly unusual cases this team brought him, even if they themselves made him want to take them home and feed them.

  Ross had a full-on headache. She found herself looking at an ops board that now took up three A3 sheets of paper and covered the corkboard under it. Sidebars had stretched onto the walls, fixed there with Blu-tack. She could imagine this case reaching a point where it covered the interior of the Portakabin like wallpaper, with no two data points seeming to relate to each other. She was literally living inside chaos.

  ‘Ballard,’ she said, going over once again what she’d added to the explosion of fact, ‘used a fake ID to sign on as a security guard with a company who weren’t used on any of the premises.’

  ‘The mere fact he was genuinely a security guard seems to have been enough for the ritual element of this,’ said Sefton. ‘He didn’t have to work there. This is so much about rules and specifics, it’s like someone’s determinedly ignoring the emotional side of the power of London and is getting OCD about the details.’

  ‘He did that within hours of getting his freedom,’ said Costain, ‘like he was planning something new even while he was in custody. Him suddenly deciding to look into being a security guard is a hell of a coincidence otherwise.’

  ‘It’s a hell of a coincidence that it was what suited our opponents,’ said Ross. ‘So I don’t think it is a coincidence. But I have no conclusions to draw beyond that. The back of the safe, after a very thick wall and several security de
vices, all of which were knocked out by the same untraceable worm that set off those burglar alarms, leads to a storeroom of the money-transfer company next door. What CCTV there was went down at the same time, but a chalk doorway of the same size was found there, and some blood splashes. It’s being forensicated now, but I’m betting we’ll find that’s the murder room. So Ballard and assailants walked in there, either through the front door or using walkthrough, the chalk from which was then rubbed away. On this occasion they had time to do that. Perhaps Ballard did think he was being consulted about a robbery, came along to help out. Having dumped the body, they must have walked out of the safe using walkthrough, then out of the front of that building next door. Again, CCTV was down.’

  ‘The muscle-locking business is interesting,’ said Sefton. ‘I reckon some sort of artefact was used on Ballard, maybe one of his own, to hold him in place, maybe force him to act out being Holmes. Ballard followed the news like anyone else, and knew of our interest in the Holmes murders, so he wouldn’t have done that willingly.’ He let out a long breath. ‘Shit, he would have reacted as soon as he saw the deerstalker.’

  ‘Upon which there is no trace of anything but Ballard,’ sighed Ross.

  Rebecca Lofthouse hated that she was going to be out of touch with both Costain’s team and with the continuing efforts to find James. Her own task this weekend, however, was, in the end, more important.

  She’d confided about her ‘affair’ to Sally Rutherford specifically because she was the organizer of a conference in Coventry this weekend. That had seemed at the time Lofthouse had decided on it to be an opportunity to dig deeper into the mysteries of her own past, but now the date had come around, it was actually a chance to go even further. She’d called Sally from a payphone and told her a ton of romantic nonsense about the man who was going to take her away from her cruel husband. They were going off to Paris together, when Lofthouse was meant to be in Coventry. If anyone asked, would she mind . . .? Sally agreed, with only slight and required protest, to be her accomplice. The powers of the entity that was possessing her husband, Lofthouse reasoned, only extended as far as London’s boroughs, and certainly not to Coventry.

  Having set up her cover, when she was supposed to be heading for the train, she actually went to a supplier of caving equipment and put the manager of the shop through a swift interrogation. Working from a position of complete ignorance, because she hadn’t been able to research this beforehand, she quickly discovered exactly what she would need. She left with a rucksack full of equipment and a how-to book. She’d had to dress this morning to suit a meeting, so she bought a change of clothes as well, aware all the time of how weighed down she was going to be.

  Finally, as the first late-afternoon gloom set in, she headed for Tower Hill. At the end of a street that was rather wonderfully called Petty Wales, along from the Tower of London ticket office, she found the little brown turret of a building. Stern lettering round it declared, ‘London Hydraulic Power Company, Tower Subway, Constructed AD 1868’.

  There were a great many tourists wandering past, many of them stopping at the ice-cream van that, even this late in the season, stood nearby. The power company in question had bought the tunnel under the Thames when Tower Bridge had opened just downstream, making this subway unprofitable. The company had closed the system in 1977 and had itself been put up for sale. Its right to dig up London streets made it attractive to Mercury Communications, a cable company. They’d become part of Cable & Wireless, then been bought out by NTL, then sold on to NPower. Lofthouse had arranged a visit to NPower’s London offices on the pretext of addressing their security concerns in light of recent fuel-poverty demonstrations. Once inside, she’d gone to the toilet and passed on the way back a little office, the door of which was open. Inside it hung a particular bunch of keys. Those were now in her handbag.

  She walked up to the little tower like she owned it, used the keys on the multiple locks and, once inside, locked the door behind her.

  The circular stairway smelt of metropolitan engineering and damp. It was lit with tiny bulbs in cages. It led by way of a short flight of steps to a narrow tunnel, alongside which ran the rubbery bulk of enormous cables.

  She walked quickly along, looking at the opposite wall for the access point she sought. She took out the piece of paper with the drawing on it that she’d found in the intangible flat. Her researches, conducted in snatched moments in libraries and never online, indicated that what she had in her hand might connect to the world . . . right here. She was looking at a door-sized metal plate in the floor, bolted down. She’d expected something fixed by ancient decay, but those bolts looked . . . greasy, with silver in the black, recently used.

  Now she’d found it, she took the opportunity to change into boots, trousers and pullover, and pack up her work clothes. Then she took her tools from her bag and got to work on those bolts. She felt the key on her charm bracelet start to react. She was doing the right thing. Thank God. As she worked, she thought of how she’d got that damn key, of all the hurt and wonder it had brought into her life.

  TWENTY

  Five years ago

  Rebecca Lofthouse had always been famously hard to wake up. Her husband said only duty could wake her, because when the phone rang in the middle of the night, only then would she be instantly aware and reaching for the notepad she kept on her bedside table. It was a blessing for a copper, she’d always thought, that facility to switch off.

  So this morning, when she woke to the sound of the alarm at six, felt Peter stir beside her, reached under the pillow and found something there, it seemed entirely plausible to her that what she’d just laid her hand on had been placed there without her knowledge. She slid it out and looked at it.

  It was a key, very small, with a hole in the fob. It was ancient, made of metal, smoothed by many hands over a long time, but its tiny teeth looked unaffected, viable. The overall impression was that it was something from archaeology that had been put to modern use. To sharpen those teeth like that, surely that was doing damage to a relic?

  Handling it, she suddenly felt the most tremendous déjà vu, but as always that feeling faded with the application of reason. She knew she’d never seen this object before. She rolled over, the key balled in her fist, and embraced her husband. ‘What’s this?’

  He made a questioning noise, and when made to wake up and focus on the key, he looked puzzled. He’d never seen it before, he said. With a slight sinking of her heart, she believed him. He wasn’t one for romantic surprises.

  That morning, as she dressed for work, she kept going back to the key, picking it up, looking at it, rolling it between her hands. It felt somehow . . . urgent. There was, of course, the matter of how it had got under her pillow. Could she be sure it hadn’t been there when she’d gone to sleep? No. Was it something a cleaner had done, some sort of charm, a wish for good luck? Nice thought, bit creepy. A conversation with her cleaner yielded only puzzled denials.

  She put the key in her bedside drawer, but every time she went to bed, every time she woke up, and sometimes in the night when she’d been dreaming about something tense and violent and woke up sweating, she could sort of . . . feel it there. So she moved it to the study, but still she could feel it. It was like it was demanding something of her. Some days she felt that she should remember what this object signified, why it seemed so important to her. The feeling it gave her made her go to her doctor, nervous about the onset of some degenerative brain condition, but that had been a red herring, thank God.

  So, one day, she did what she did with everything that made her feel vulnerable: she brought it closer to her. She opened her old charm bracelet and slipped the wire through the hole on the key, and damn well wore what worried her. ‘From now on, Sonny Jim,’ she said to it, ‘I’ve got you where I can see you.’

  It turned out to be a good idea. Every now and then, when she was dealing with a case where a decision had to be made, she would suddenly feel the weight of her bracelet a
nd note that the key was swinging in one direction or the other. She always found that direction implied a particular choice.

  For a long time, she fought off that conclusion about what was happening. It made her feel like a bloody ‘psychic’, like she was dowsing. In the end, however, after so many good calls, she couldn’t deny the reality of it. She decided that she’d made the key into what it was, that it was just a focus for her concentration. After all, it didn’t have an ‘opinion’ on every case, just a peculiar, seemingly random selection of them.

  In the next year or so, the main focus of Lofthouse’s role as a detective superintendent started to be the pursuit of that most obvious and miraculously non-jailable of gang leaders, Rob Toshack. One morning, she sat down with a blank piece of paper and started to plan an operation to finally have him: multiple undercovers, ‘strangers’ from up north; a very long game. She’d need a solid London detective inspector to lead it, either Jason Forrest out of Belgravia, who she knew . . . God, no, just the thought made her feel ill, for some reason. Why was she suddenly reacting like that? There was nothing wrong with Jason. She realized she could feel the key swinging at her wrist, but that emotional reaction that had come with the movement, that was new. OK, then, what about someone she didn’t know, James Quill, who’d been recommended to her? What if she asked him?

  Her heart leaped with something fierce that felt like love.

  She grabbed the bracelet from her wrist and threw it onto the desk.

  She stared at it in shock for a moment, then put it back on, ashamed of herself. She was blushing, and furious at the same time. She had no feelings for this complete stranger other than a distant admiration. This feeling from the key had gone far beyond a hunch. This was like a bunch of cheerleaders had rushed into her brain screaming support.