by Paul Cornell
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WHO
KILLED
SHERLOCK
HOLMES?
PAUL CORNELL
TOR
For Deborah Stanish
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
Acknowledgements
PROLOGUE
Christopher Lassiter pinched the top of his nose and closed his eyes. Quiet desperation is the English way. This situation had taken him by surprise. He’d never imagined that he could be seen as a scrounger. God, hadn’t he paid his way? Wasn’t that the bloody idea, that you paid your way, then if you fell on hard times, they helped you out? Yet here it was, open on the table in front of him, a form asking him about his ‘fitness for work’. The language used wasn’t so much cold as downright harsh. He’d almost called the phone number on here right away – there must be some mistake – until he’d realized it wasn’t free to call, and of course they’d keep you hanging on listening to Mumford & Sons, while some Indian call centre watched the clock tick away before finally deciding they’d squeezed you enough and would deign to—
He carefully put down the form. He’d been in the RAF, damn it – that’s what he wanted to say. He hadn’t been an actor all his life; he’d done something useful, for a jolly long time, before the chronic fatigue syndrome. His journalism had been useful after that too, before the BBC had decided that they could make up news broadcasts from press releases on the Internet. Being in this bloody chair was not his fault. Having a spare bedroom, in which was piled everything from a life that had been too big for this tiny flat, well, he was going to be blamed for that now too, wasn’t he? You should get a Polish lodger in, squeeze him like we’re squeezing you! Where was he supposed to put everything? Did they think he could afford storage? Wasn’t the totality of his life, his character, worth more than a mere collection of data points?
The sudden headache made him wince. It was that that had finally done him in, so he couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t develop a train of thought, couldn’t present to camera without making the viewers aware of pain, couldn’t remember his lines. The pain had taken his ability to make money, and now here they wanted everything else, wanted him to work for nothing, even. Where would he live? He wouldn’t mind getting out of London, the way the place was going, but his only social life was the pub round the corner. He was all right here, tucked away, though you sometimes got kids wandering around the side streets, drunk, on their way home from the Brixton Academy. There was even a bit of green nearby if you inclined your head at the kitchen window at just the right angle. Didn’t he deserve these small, last comforts? These days, every comfortable shape you felt you could lean on just seemed to have fallen away.
The ring on the doorbell came as a blessed relief. It also surprised him. Who would that be? Some arse with a collecting tin. He’d ask them for money. He wheeled himself over to the answering device and saw a shape behind the frosted glass. He pressed the button. ‘Who is it?’
‘Old friend of yours!’
Chris was sure he recognized the voice, but couldn’t put his finger on where from. He hit the other button and in strode . . . Oh, what a welcome sight!
‘Well,’ he said, ‘what brings you here?’
Christopher Lassiter’s body was found eight days later. With the warm early autumn weather, it had taken that long for Mr Peng, who owned the shop beside the flat, to notice the smell, and to realize he hadn’t seen Chris coming and going. The door was knocked upon by Jackie Dorney, a community support officer from Coldharbour Safer Neighbourhood Team, and finally opened with a duplicate key provided by the landlord, who’d been bloody elusive.
She found Lassiter lying beside his wheelchair, his face contorted in agony. He’d obviously been dead some time. She took one long, careful look at the room, then stepped back out of the flat without touching anything, closed the door behind her, took out her Airwave radio and called it in as a suspicious death. The civilian Metcall centre worker went through her script as she had for all the more ordinary times Jackie had contacted her, finally told her to wait there, and she acknowledged. She made herself stay standing upright, though she wanted to lean against the wall in shock, because she was aware of passers-by starting to look. This had to be a murder. There’d been no sign of any wounds on the body, no blood near it, except . . . the memory of it got to her only in some deep way that let her conscious mind stay calm above it . . . except the walls had been daubed with blood, a single word written in it above the corpse, a word that wasn’t in English, but that, even so, Jackie found weirdly familiar.
Within a few minutes, local uniforms and CID arrived to secure the scene and make initial enquiries. Within an hour, crime scene examiners and detectives from SC&O1, the Homicide and Serious Crime Command, had arrived, and Jackie was questioned at the scene, then released to write up her notes, which would become a witness statement. She saw the story on the news that night. A man in his sixties had been found dead, they said, and police were seeking witnesses who’d seen anyone calling at the flat in the past two weeks. So there couldn’t have been any useful CCTV footage of his front door. The circumstances of his death were suspicious.
Jackie felt she now understood her job a little more. All the horror she’d seen in that room was regularly reduced to words like that. She worried for the coppers who encountered such things on a regular basis.
That same day, a detective constable on the Major Investigation Team talked to a reporter off the record and soon the resulting story was all over the media. They were still waiting for the post-mortem and the toxicology tests, but the lack of any other apparent cause of death suggested Lassiter had been poisoned. The blood on the wall wasn’t his, but that of an as-yet-unidentified third party. The simplest research had revealed that the wor
d that had been written there was an obvious reference, but that didn’t mean other possibilities as to what it might mean were being ruled out. That word had now been seen by the world, in a grainy long-lens photo taken through the window of Christopher Lassiter’s flat, when, for reasons perhaps influenced by money, someone inside had just for a moment pulled aside the curtains.
The word was Rache.
ONE
Three imperial stormtroopers strode into Chilcott’s bank on Park Street in Mayfair, brandishing their weapons, ‘The Imperial March’ playing from concealed speakers somewhere on their person. They got a chuckle from the three or four people sitting in the foyer, waiting to go back into the meeting rooms. One broad-shouldered chap in an expensive suit saluted them with his designer cup of African coffee, but Lacey Fitzherbert, through her own fear, could feel the awkwardness. Chilcott’s was not Barclays on the high street. This marble and teak foyer was more like the entrance of a hotel; nothing so infra dig as tills for a bank as rah as Chilcott’s. It smelt of some sort of polish that Lacey had only smelt otherwise at stately homes. Someone, these customers would be thinking, was going to have to tell these fine fellows they’d find no opportunity for a charity collection here, not from the rich. Unfortunately, the customers’ thoughts were irrelevant, because Lacey knew exactly what was about to happen.
The stormtroopers turned slowly, checking where everyone was. Oh God, this was it; this was what they’d paid her for; this was what her dad had begged her about at the kitchen table. ‘Nobody will ever know,’ he’d said. ‘We would never put you in danger unless it was . . . It’s just that they . . . they came to us, and . . .’
She was suddenly very aware of the new guy standing beside her. What was his name? Kevin, that was it. He had a concerned look on his face. She’d noticed him as soon as he’d arrived, a week ago, those rugby-player muscles under his jacket, and she had a thing about black guys. He set off her gaydar a bit, but these days who didn’t? She stepped away from him, just a little closer to the desk she’d been hovering near all morning. Now she thought about it, she’d noticed him glancing over at her a few times.
‘What are they—?’ he started to say.
The lead stormtrooper swung round, pointed his gun at a corner of the room with no people in it and fired a burst. A piece of modern sculpture exploded into fragments. It was the loudest noise Lacey had ever heard. ‘Stay fucking put!’ he bellowed, his voice amplified and distorted by what must be a microphone under his helmet. His two mates had swung to cover the customers with their weapons, and the fine ladies and gentlemen had leaped up and were shrinking back, screaming, their hands in the air. One of them, the woman nearest to the door, was hesitating, Lacey noticed. Had the stormtroopers seen that she was thinking about going for it? Should Lacey say something? Suddenly, she kicked off her shoes and ran.
Lacey shouted – she didn’t know who to – and half put up a hand to prevent herself from seeing what was about to happen, or stop it from happening, or something. The loudest possible noise roared again, but as she looked, the door was slamming back against its frame. The woman had made it.
‘You do not do that!’ the lead stormtrooper bellowed again at the customers. ‘If anyone else tries that, I will fucking kill all the rest. Do you understand? Do you understand?!’
There were nodded assents. One of the stormtroopers was running to the door, where he started quickly and expertly locking it.
‘Why didn’t they do that on the way in, do you reckon?’ said Kevin. He sounded really bloody calm about all this.
The lead stormtrooper swung his gun in Lacey’s direction, and Lacey knew, horribly, that she’d already disobeyed; she’d already left it too long to do what she had to. She jerked out her hand and found the silent alarm button under the counter.
‘What are you fucking doing?’ The lead stormtrooper marched over, snatching up his gun to aim at her head. She thought of her mum and dad, and hoped desperately that she wasn’t the victim of some huge lie. He was about to grab her round the throat, shove his gun to her head. That was what she’d been told he’d do. She’d thought about it many times, but she hadn’t had that enormous sound in her head and stomach then. Still, she was going to let it happen.
But then Kevin moved between them. Dear God, no, was he going to try to be a hero?
The stormtrooper swung his gun away from her to cover him. ‘Step away.’
Kevin raised his hands, looking concerned and careful, not taking any risks. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘there’s no need for anyone to get hurt. You’ve come for the safe deposit boxes, right? That’s all we have of value here. Well, I can show you where they are. I know where the two sets of keys are. I can even get you the list of who owns which box.’
The stormtrooper paused.
Lacey felt panic start to take over. What the hell was Kevin talking about? Why would he lie? Only staff of her level of seniority could get hold of that list. That was one reason she was in this mess. She’d already given that list to her parents, to pass on to whoever was behind all this. To get the keys, you’d need to be a couple of pay grades higher. Today, that would be only . . . No, looking around the staff here today, she couldn’t actually see anyone else she knew: it must all be guys from the other shifts in today, which was weird, now she thought about it. Her thoughts snapped back to the here and now. Not only was Kevin putting her family’s life in jeopardy with this mad offer, so was the bloody stormtrooper by thinking about it. She had to demonstrate her willingness to go along with the plan, to show them that her hesitancy about the alarm hadn’t been deliberate. She pushed her way past Kevin and lunged at the stormtrooper, falling into him, the bravest thing she had ever done. She hoped it looked like she was having a go at getting his gun or trying to escape or something.
‘Tell me who can open the safe deposit boxes!’ he yelled into her ear, back on script, trying to make it obvious that he was addressing her and not Kevin. He grabbed her throat, which hurt like fuck. No, she wanted to say, not that hard. I can’t breathe! He remembered and let go enough for her to speak.
‘I won’t tell you!’ she shouted.
‘I can!’ Kevin insisted, pointing at himself.
The stormtrooper paused awkwardly again. He obviously had as little idea as she did what Kevin’s weird willingness to help was about. Lacey looked over her shoulder into those blank eye sockets, willing whoever was under there just to follow his orders.
Kevin looked perplexed. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘do you want to rob this bank or not?’
‘Don’t listen to him!’ Lacey gasped. ‘He doesn’t know what he’s talking about!’
One of the stormtroopers yelled from the front door, ‘Police! Fucking loads!’
The stormtrooper holding Lacey let go. He looked around as if making his mind up under pressure. He was, just from the body language, a terrible actor, but that in a stormtrooper outfit looked somehow authentic. ‘All right,’ he finally yelled, ‘this is now a hostage situation!’
Lacey closed her eyes in sheer relief. That was what she had been told to expect. She had done her part. She, Kevin and the handful of other staff and customers were yelled at and rushed back into the meeting rooms by the three stormtroopers, who shoved them into corners, told them to sit and slammed the doors on them. Through the big panel windows, Lacey watched as they started to arrange the seating into a rough barricade, pulling out unfolding metal sheets from their backpacks to add to their defences. Presumably they weren’t worried about anyone thinking, at this point, that they seemed to have come very well prepared for a siege they weren’t expecting.
‘They let us keep our phones,’ said a voice from beside her. It was, of course, Kevin. He still sounded strangely calm. ‘So hey, we can tell the world we’re in a siege.’ He took his phone out and typed a very quick text that seemed to consist of a single word.
Few people knew that the private home that stood next to Chilcott’s bank on Park Street in Mayfair had two levels of ce
llars. In London, there were strict ordinances about building upwards, so if one had no elbow room sideways and one wanted, say, a new pool, or, in this case, a new home cinema, one applied, with the aid of solicitors who specialized in that sort of thing, for planning permission, hoping all the while that the underground railway wasn’t too close to the surface. Having got said planning permission, one got the builders in, and they got the excavators in, and they started to chew downwards. Much too noisy to stay put during all that, of course, so one pissed off to one of one’s other houses, somewhere abroad, which was where, Mark Ballard knew, the owners of this abode were once again, oblivious to what he was doing in the home cinema they’d had built several years ago.
What he was doing at this very moment was standing in a newly excavated area to one side of the cinema, looking up at an incongruous mechanical digger. It was standing part in and part out of an excavated concrete wall. Some of it, where it had got in the way of what Ballard’s team were doing, had been sawn off and piled nearby. It was as if they’d unearthed a dinosaur.
It had been a news story about the presence of the digger down here that had first alerted him to the possibilities this building next to Chilcott’s bank had to offer. Big construction companies, making millions on underground developments such as this, had initially gone to the bother of bringing in cranes to lift mechanical diggers, once their work was done, out of their excavations. Then they’d realized that the cost-benefit analysis actually tipped in the direction of just finding somewhere to hide the digger and leaving it entombed in a wall, the company sometimes going just a little bit beyond the planning permission they’d been given for the few days it took to do so. Ballard had slipped someone at City Hall some cash to get a look at the plans and realized that, yes, the only place the digger could have been entombed was right up against the bank.
Its presence, leading to structural weaknesses in the concrete, had made his team’s initial drilling a lot easier. He had, once again, found a little crack in reality and had grabbed it and ripped it open like . . . well, like pulling apart a chicken. He often thought of the moment he’d really done that. He’d been fifteen, on some outing with a bunch of other kids from ‘deprived backgrounds’ or whatever the term had been back then. He’d needed to show the girl he was with what he could do. He’d climbed over the gate at a city farm, and had grinned back at her, and had been quick enough to catch the chicken, and had hauled its legs both ways in a second. The shriek it had made had stayed with him. He’d known from that moment that he was someone who could and would do anything.