Thirteen Authors With New Takes on Sherlock Holmes

by Michael A. Ventrella

  “Paranoia.” Holmes spoke in a soft mumble, swatting dismissively at the air. “Just setting in because I’m late with my Triv—”

  What if it were true, he thought. What if the meds didn’t only enhance a person’s ability to do a job? What if they altered a mind to make someone more easily satisfied, more easily controlled? Holmes looked at the note again.

  They keep us in our place.

  Side-by-side with the little red capsule, the words took on a foreboding shape. Holmes looked around his apartment at the oily stove top, the pile of disorganized mail, the remote unit for his TV that was missing its batteries. He tipped his head back and slapped a hand to his open mouth. The capsule bounced against the back of his palate.

  He froze where he stood, and waited. The slow thumping of blood in his ears beat like a metronome against the quiet night. Irene’s note didn’t say anything about the effects or how long they might take to show themselves. Holmes sat down at his table until his leg started to tingle. Then he was up and began pacing the length of his drawing room. Nothing. For over an hour he’d waited, watching the lights dance in traffic from his window. Nothing.

  “The hell are you thinking?” Holmes chided his partial reflection in a glass-front cupboard. “She sends you some mystery med, could be a vitamin pill for all you know, and you drop it down like a fool! That woman can still play you like a viol.”

  Holmes thought for a moment about bringing the envelope to the police, but he hurriedly brushed off the idea like dog’s hair from a jacket. He walked back to his couch and filled his electric pipe with some of his strongest tobacco essence and made himself comfortable. The vaporizing bowl end of the pipe began to seep a slow, curling stream of gray into the air. The smell of wood and clove spread through the flat. His sound system was set to detect certain cues from him, and Mozart’s Serenade Number 6 started up, slowly rising in volume until Holmes set it with a wave of his hand. It was the violin solo that pulled at his heart. He felt a stab of guilt about his own playing and how he should make more time to practice. The vapor trails above him began to throb with the music. He started to notice a warm numbness in his face.

  Patterns of repeated shapes began to pull themselves out of the twisting cloud above his head. A cluster of gray curls took on a cascading shape that reminded him of the way she pinned her hair up when she was working. The shape faded as it grew, molding itself into leering gray faces and an endless, trackless void behind them. It rose with the intensity of the orchestra strings and spread across the ceiling of the apartment. Slowly, with unyielding force, the void sank and surrounded him. Holmes felt a dry burning in his eyes and the numbness spread over him, felling his limbs. Patterns appeared and repeated all around him, all relating, connecting. He drifted into the darkness alone, with only his music to guide him.

  Holmes began to stir when the rose gold of the afternoon sun fell over his face. He found himself to be gathered into the corner of his couch like a cat. He stretched out and wiped the beaded sweat from his brow with the front of his shirt. His flat was no different, yet so much smaller.

  “Kiwi,” Holmes said. “Yesterday’s bird was the kiwi.”

  • • •

  Hot water from the bathroom sink helped Holmes to focus. He ran a towel over his face as packets of information began to thread themselves together in his mind like molecule chains. The lieutenant, Moriarty, had managed to shed some light on the problem but he couldn’t see with the eyes of someone who knew the victim. Holmes expression grew sour. The victim, he thought. The deceased. It’s easier to think in those terms rather than names. Irene carried weight, victim did not. As his mind wandered, Holmes was able to recall the photo of Irene’s desk in almost perfect detail. Something was, in fact, out of place.

  He decided not to call the lieutenant. Moriarty would, no doubt, want to know how Holmes came by this new perspective and “Scarlett” would tie him back into this investigation as a suspect. Whatever he decided, Holmes thought, he needed to move freely if he was to find what the police had missed. Holmes pulled his coat from the hook by his door and stalked out into the fading light.

  Early in the evening, Holmes found himself at a bustling little bistro a few blocks from Baskerville’s offices. With some coffee at his side and a plate of old-style fish and chips, he folded back the pages of the three separate tabloid rags that he’d bought to compare the copied images of Irene’s office. Crime scene photos were usually guarded by police but slick, big-city journalists somehow always found a source. Holmes found an exact replica of the photo he’d seen at the station. A blur of pixels sat just where the lieutenant had placed the sticky note, but the rest of the room was still visible. Holmes found details lunging out at him from the page, patterns forming in the colors and the movements of a killer implied in captured shadows.

  The web-shaped crack in the computer monitor told him that a small-caliber weapon was used. It may have been powerful enough to break through the flesh but by the time the bullet struck the screen most of its force could have been lost. That mop bucket in the corner of the picture bothered him as well. Irene hated the smell of chemical cleaners. She would have told a janitor to come around later on, when she was out.

  “Whoever brought that bucket in was the last person to see her alive,” Holmes said softly. “That doesn’t necessarily make you the killer though, does it? It only means that you parked your tools there on the time of death, or slightly after.”

  The paper claimed that the floor had been sealed off after the murder to all but police investigators, but parts of it were being reopened so business could be resumed.

  “If…if I could have a look at that office before they open again, I…” His whispering trailed off when he caught sight of a bistro employee walking out with a mop bucket to clean up a spill. The yellow sign that read WET FLOOR in three languages bore the shop’s logo. The one in the picture had none.

  It didn’t take Holmes long to find out which cleaning service was contracted by Baskerville. He also found out that the cleanup project was to start that very night. Through a series of calls and an internet search, he’d found them. He’d shadowed one of their crew long enough to identify the blue coveralls and generic tool belt that they wore. Piecing together his disguise was a simple matter at a nearby hardware store and, by midnight, he saw the cleaning service trucks at the entrance of Baskerville’s complex. He’d had the cab driver leave him a block from the entrance. He walked up slowly, carefully. Holmes wrapped his coat around himself, pulled his hat down, and slipped in at the edge of the crowd.

  “’Old on there.” A man with a collared shirt and a sizable set of muttonchops clapped him on the shoulder. “You got ID?” Holmes said nothing, and a single raised eyebrow answered for him.

  “You speak English? Par le voo…fooking English?”

  “Yar.” Holmes grunted, slouched, and shifted his glance.

  “ID? The lil’ card with your pict’re on it. You have one?”

  “Lost it, squire. Sorry.”

  The man turned and watched the rest of his team filing into the side entrance. He scratched at his chops and let out an exasperated breath.

  “What’s your name, then?”

  “Ellis.”

  “Ellis wha’?”

  “Michael,” Holmes said, shaking his head in denial.

  “Ellis Michael?”

  “Nah. Michael Ellis.”

  The foreman let out a grunt. His team was gone and probably waiting for him.

  “Where you from?”

  “Ips’ich.”

  “What switch?”

  “Nah. Ip!” He shook his head again.

  “What?”

  “Ip-swich. Ipswich. Ellis, Michael.”

  “That’s what I said.…Go! Just go! I’ll get ya a fooking timecard.”

  “Yar,” Holmes said, heading for the door.

  The quiet stillness of the closed floor was disorienting. The silence seemed to amplify his perception in ways he co
uldn’t have predicted. The path to Irene’s office seemed to rise up from under the tide of memory without much effort. Holmes found himself making turns on something akin to instinct, since most of the wall signs weren’t lit. For a moment, he began to doubt the precision of these new senses. Finding himself in front of Irene’s door put those doubts to rest.

  The door opened inward to beams of streetlight, sliced into thin layers by the blinds and thrown against the far wall. Most of the things that Holmes had seen in the papers and at the police station were still in place. Her desk had been shoved into a corner but the cracked PC monitor was still present. It sat under a thin plastic sheet, on the floor by her file cabinets. One of which was tall, almost up to the ceiling, and painted deep burgundy. Holmes pulled a pair of latex gloves over his hands and peeled the cover from the monitor. The impact of the bullet could still be seen at the center of its web. The back side of the monitor showed no exit damage.

  Holmes looked over the desk, throwing off another plastic sheet. What was left of the dried blood had been scraped off, most likely to be registered as genetic evidence. Holmes picked through the drawers and compartments until he found what was mentioned in the letter. An external hard drive about the size of a business card sat at the back of a cubby, a collection of cables wrapped in a messy spool around it. Holmes lifted it out, careful not to swing the cables against the desk top, and began to unfurl the mess onto the floor. All the components seemed to be there. Holmes sat back and looked over the parts.

  His mind’s eye watched the drive connect to a power outlet in the wall, and then to the shattered monitor. If enough of the screen was left functional, he thought, her project files could be accessed. He pulled himself upright and started looking through his collection of cables. A thick wire with an AC adapter and a data cable just happened to sit atop the pile.

  The screen sputtered to life, with splashes of color appearing and warping between the network of cracks and thin brown scrape marks. Two typing fields appeared through those cracks, breaking apart and slanting like sliced bamboo. The name that she’d used appeared in the top space but the password field was blank. Holmes tried to recall the letter. He read her last words to him again. An obvious password, she’d said.

  “Hound” didn’t gain him access. Neither did “Sherlock,” “London,” or “scripts.” His brow creased as a new idea surfaced, the most obvious word that could possibly appear. Scarlett slowly appeared in the empty space as his hands fell about the keys in awkward thumps.

  Denied.

  “The answer is in front of me,” Holmes whispered to himself. “The password is obvious, or so she claimed. But she would have been clever enough to know what’s obvious to me.…unless…”

  Obvious.

  The screen went blank for a moment and the colorful slashes of broken liquid crystal reappeared with icons of folders, littered across the open space.

  Holmes clicked his way through folder after folder of financial records, communiqués from investors to their pet policymakers, test results, and research from a slew of laboratories biological and technical. Near the bottom of a folder colored in red, he found a little text file called “Scarlett.”

  Irene’s personal notes about the project included some information about enhancers in other markets as well. Trivalia was listed as a “strength and endurance booster” for the labor market with “cognition-damping” effects. Roburall, meant for police and private security, was shown to enhance “speed of thought,” reaction time, and physical dexterity, while hindering a person’s will to question instructions. The list that followed was a wide range of scripts that were marketed to employers, all of whom required their workforces to participate. Scarlett, Holmes found, was still in the testing phase. The drug was meant for the use of British intelligence or the GCHQ, American CIA, and intelligence contractors of the big multinationals. “Cognitive and deductive” effects were stitched into a cocktail of other stimulants to form a physical and mental toolkit for the military elite. It had only just been approved for human trials.

  He scrolled the struggling cursor down to the most recent message. A private email, marked “urgent,” dated a week before Irene’s murder, was copied into the body of the text. The sender was “J. Watson,” and his message was short.

  They found you. Get out now.

  The sound of a careful boot scraping the floor behind him alerted Holmes to his companion. The loud, almost careless clicking of a pistol’s hammer told him that it wasn’t a policeman.

  “I’ll thank you to keep your hands where I can see them.” The armed intruder was a squat, rounded little man. His coveralls were the same as the working crew that had entered the building, as was his brown leather tool belt. Holmes took a moment to look the man over once he’d stepped into the light.

  “You must be some kind of private investigator.” The shorter man’s voice was thin, high in pitch but still retaining a masculine sound. “You’re certainly not police material, judging by your sneaking about.”

  “And…” Holmes took a moment to review his mental notes, “you’re the one that took the shot. Aren’t you?”

  The little man’s face was partly covered by slats of shadow but his figure seemed to tense at the implication.

  “Stop me if I’m wrong, would you?” Holmes stood, taller and wider in the shoulders than the other man. “That pistol is a small .22. Small enough to conceal but perfectly lethal at close range. Last time it was here, it was fitted with a noise-suppression kit. I can assume that much from the one-sided strike against the computer screen. Your suppressor slowed the bullet just enough to get it caught in the glass.”

  Holmes tapped the shattered monitor with a boot tip. The little man took a step inside and closed the door behind him, keeping an eye on Holmes as he did.

  “Those boots also seem much too tactical for a janitor’s work.” Holmes pointed with his chin at the man’s matte-black, sixteen-eyelet boots that were probably waterproof. “They’re too heavy for you as well; that’s why you scuff the floor when you walk. SAS leftovers, I would think.”

  “You seem to have read up on me, mister…”

  “Holmes. I haven’t done any reading on you, but I saw the police photos. All I needed to do was look you over for the rest. Besides, why else would you come armed to a closed area but to retrieve the bullet? You obviously didn’t have time for it after the shot.”

  The smaller man set his jaw and raised his pistol. Holmes dove to the floor. Amid the clatter of plastic sheets and scattering hardware, he could hear a quick pop-popping sound from the doorway and things seemed to be bursting around him in sequence. Holmes flattened himself against the far side of the tall burgundy file case. Two rounds rang off the opposite side of the file case, making a shrill, grating report.

  “You’re a quick one. Quick and cleverer than myself, I’ll admit…” The sound of a fresh magazine being slapped into place lurked beneath the voice. Holmes heard it clearly, but wasn’t able to spot an escape before his attacker was done reloading. “I might not be able to get you through that metal, but you’ve got nowhere to go. The minute you look round that corner, I’ll put a shot through your eye. If you fancy waiting, I have all night, Mr. Holmes.”

  Holmes tried to slow his breathing, tried to keep an image of the room in his mind and searched it for any means of escape. The window was too far, he thought, too many opportunities for a shot. The shooter was blocking the door and the adjoining office was locked. Holmes spun the gears of his newly renovated wits with all the fury he could muster. He thought about the height of the cabinet. He thought about the distance to the door.

  The little man craned his head forward, intrigued by the queer rocking of the cabinet, but he had only enough time for a feeble shout before the second kick tipped it over. Tall as it was, it easily reached the office door with a heavy crack and caught the shooter in between. The drawers fell out and slammed onto the floor, dumping years of records. When the noise had subsided, Holme
s looked out from the corner to see the shooter suspended by his throat. The top edge of the falling cabinet had pinned him to the door. Holmes stepped lightly from behind the fallen file case just as he could hear the steps of the cleaning crew rushing up the hallway. A feeling, some new instinct, prompted Holmes to pick up the fallen .22 while his hands were still gloved. He also ripped the false identification from the man’s shirt. Holmes was out the window and gone by the time the crew reached the door.

  • • •

  Sirens swam in the distance, rising and falling through the drifts of snow that swelled in the streets. Ordinarily, Holmes tended to tense when the police blew past in their cars or sprinted around him on their cycles. This new Holmes, Holmes plus Scarlett, wasn’t upset in the least. Somehow he knew that, if they were called to the scene he’d just left, the investigation would start as a simple accident. Things will become complicated when the cleaners produce no employment record of the dead man, he thought. Murder inquiries were painfully detailed and thankfully time-consuming. Holmes sat in a small cafe and began to pick through Baskerville’s available records on a public internet terminal.

  A gray foxtail of steam swayed from the cup at his side and seemed to wag in unison with the flashing adverts of the webpages. Holmes had already seen the files concerning the Baskerville Company and its shadow projects, but J. Watson had turned out to be a very interesting character as well. From what Holmes read, Dr. John Watson was one of the foremost experts in the field of bioenhancement and commercial chemistry, and his was thought to be the mind behind the Scarlett project. Holmes had seen the name on some financial records at Irene’s office, and he also recalled seeing a J. Watson on her list of private contacts. Holmes took a quick look around and reached under the counter.