Who Killed Sherlock Holmes?

by Paul Cornell

  ‘He doesn’t want to take his helmet off to answer that,’ said Kevin. ‘So they’re hoping to get out of here. Which is good news. Also, they hadn’t anticipated still being here when the police got to the negotiation stage, which seems to have happened really quickly, so they’re hoping to get out of here soon. Also good news.’ He started texting again.

  The stormtrooper finally just smashed the phone off the desk, stuck one finger up to the CCTV camera and ran back to the barricade.

  ‘Why did the negotiator call so early?’ whispered Lacey.

  ‘It wasn’t the negotiator,’ said Kevin; ‘it was a mate of mine called Lisa, who wanted to learn those two things.’

  Ballard stood in front of his target safe deposit box – one of the large, walk-in ones – the diamond drill in his hand. He possessed an object that could use London’s power against concrete, but not against aluminium and twelve-gauge steel. He was also at the stub end of his stick of chalk and wanted to keep some in case he needed an emergency getaway. Still, doing this the old-fashioned way, with only two boxes per worker, they’d be out of here within the hour. The police, following standard negotiating practice, would keep the robbery team waiting longer than that before even making contact. He started up the drill and began to cut round the first lock.

  Alex Kyson was getting bloody hot under the stormtrooper helmet. He was a career criminal in his thirties, the sort of lad who lived in the sort of pubs where if you worked out and had a steady nerve in the back-room poker, you got offers to step over the line. Each step took you further, and hopefully none of the steps were anything you couldn’t step back from. This bank job was the furthest he’d ever stepped. He knew blokes who’d turned it down, because they didn’t trust the patron, but, as a result of how difficult recruiting for this gig had turned out to be, the patron had given him a little demonstration of what he could do, and from that moment, Alex was in. The stormtrooper bit had been his idea, the sort of flourish that got you talked about by the right blokes, got you into the true-crime books. It had been going great, apart from that unexpectedly helpful bank worker, but now the timeline was getting a bit dodgy.

  He leaned heavily on the barricade, glancing back to the hostages every now and then to make sure they were busily texting away. That phone call coming so early was worrying. It wasn’t as if it could have been someone calling about their mortgage: all the regular calls to the building would have been blocked. He looked to the doorway that led to the stairwell down to the safe deposit vault. That was the direction from which salvation would come, and it was meant to be coming soon.

  ‘You reckon the boss has burned us?’ said Van, his Dutch accent making the concept sound almost gentle, even through the helmet.

  ‘We don’t have any reason to start thinking like that. Not yet.’ He looked back to the front door and saw through the glass that a figure was standing outside, a small woman in a business suit. She had her hands up.

  ‘More negotiations?’

  ‘Let her in.’ They could buy time by talking.

  Van did as he was told. With the other stormtroopers covering the move, a slight, smart woman was pulled inside the building and over to the barricade and the doors locked again behind her.

  She regarded Alex with a sighing detachment. ‘Aren’t you a little short for a stormtrooper?’

  Alex stifled a laugh. ‘Who are you, then?’

  ‘Metropolitan Police Detective Superintendent Rebecca Lofthouse. I believe I used the Star Wars quote wrongly, though.’

  Alex knew his movies. ‘I don’t think so.’

  From behind him, he heard the sound of doors swinging open. He looked over his shoulder to see that every bank worker he’d had chucked into one of those offices was now standing or crouching, holding in firing postures the guns he hadn’t found, because, having planned to leave these guys with their phones, he’d had no call to search them. The odd one out was the cooperative one, who was standing back with their inside woman. The shooters had the drop on every one of his men.

  Alex also knew that plastic stormtrooper armour wouldn’t protect him and his team from real-life gunfire. He swung back to cover Lofthouse.

  Her sigh had become a benevolent smile. ‘I mean,’ she said, ‘that I’m here to rescue you.’

  Ballard felt the second lock give and heaved out its mechanism. Where were the others? They should have achieved their targets and returned by now. It wouldn’t be long before they’d have to go fetch the stormtroopers and get them out down here, the final move in the trick, like pulling the tools out of the bottle in which he’d made this elegant model ship. It was always the fucking people that let you down. He’d finish this, then go to help them. He pulled the crowbar from his coat, shoved the sharpened end into the third lock and started to throw his weight against it.

  Mitch Daniels, who was enough of an old jailbird to have taken this job because it didn’t have ‘business as usual’ written all over it, looked over his shoulder from his second target safe deposit box, also one of the walk-in ones, as Tony appeared, a lever-arch file, presumably the contents of one of the smaller boxes, in his hands.

  ‘You had a look inside?’ Mitch asked with a laugh. He hadn’t done so with the similar file he’d found in the box he’d already opened, but he’d been tempted. More things in heaven and earth, my son. Who’d have thought it?

  ‘Nah. Want a hand?’

  ‘No, this one was bloody open.’ He indicated by swinging the door back and forth. ‘That could be bad news, if they was transferring stuff when we came in. Won’t be a sec.’ Mitch ducked inside the small metal room and went to the sack that lay in one corner. The top of the sack was open.

  ‘Best take a look, then,’ said Tony.

  Mitch laughed again and pulled open the sack. He looked inside. Nothing. He looked up, with a sudden sinking feeling inside him, to see Tony coldly meeting his gaze as he swung the door closed.

  Ballard marched into his target safe deposit box. There, sitting in the middle of the floor, exactly as he’d seen it in his mind’s eye, was a golden goblet. He squatted and picked it up. His heart sank as he realized something was very wrong. The paint on the goblet was flecked. It wasn’t made of gold, or even metal. He plucked at a bit of it. This thing was made of . . . papier mâché!

  ‘Here’s one we made earlier,’ said a voice from behind him.

  Ballard spun round, panting, his hand going into the pocket of his jacket. Stepping into the metal room was a rumpled white man in his mid-forties. He wore a suit that looked like he’d slept in it, and his eyes had a terrifying lack of moderation. Ballard found himself taking a step back. It had been decades since he’d met anyone he hadn’t immediately felt able to take on. This bloke, though, had seen shit, and was only just holding on. Ballard now had his hand on something he could use to attack, but had no faith in his ability to get away with it. He’d heard whispers that the Met now had someone like this. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘To quote your mates in the other building, Luke Skywalker . . . I’m your daddy.’

  Ballard realized he could hear the sound of running boots, converging on this place. If he was going to get out, it had to be now. He threw out his hand towards the man, ripping the air straight at him, making the wall of the metal box boom with the impact.

  The man staggered, but to Ballard’s astonishment, leaped forwards again, unharmed. Before Ballard could find another weapon, one fist went into his stomach, and another smacked him sidelong across the jaw, and the next thing he knew he was lying in unaccustomed pain, brought down for the first time since he was a kid, staring up at the figure who was now squatting above him, his hands on him, actually going into his jacket, actually touching him. He tried to move, but was slammed back down and cried out in pain.

  ‘My name,’ said the man, ‘is Detective Inspector James Quill. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned . . .’

  Ballard realized he was b
eing arrested. He wanted to bellow at the man, to sob, to say he would rather fucking die. He ground his teeth together and made himself breathe. ‘How did you know?’

  Quill didn’t even smile. He finished the caution. ‘The force has been with you,’ he said. ‘Always.’

  TWO

  The next morning, Detective Constable Kevin Sefton drove into work with hope in his heart. He had the car radio on, expecting to hear, as the lead item on the news, about the bank raid his team had foiled. That’d be an obvious continuation of the narrative of success that the Metropolitan Police was feeding to the population in press release after press release, and to be fair, backing up with a surprising number of results, high-profile crimes being solved all over the place. The public, it was felt, had to be reassured that the summer of riots was behind them, that order was being restored. His team in particular had needed this big success. They’d needed something to save the other three from their brooding silences, the accusatory looks, the anger that the Ripper case had left them with. Sefton was annoyed, therefore, to find the news reports leading with a story that had been brewing for the last couple of days: the ‘Study in Scarlet murder’. A man called Christopher Lassiter had been found dead in his home in Brixton, apparently poisoned, the word ‘Rache’ written on the wall in blood other than his own.

  ‘I’m just someone who makes television,’ said a plummy voice Sefton recognized. He turned up the volume on his car radio and heard it identified as Gilbert Flamstead, the actor who played the BBC’s Sherlock Holmes. ‘The three of us, myself, Alice and Ben—’

  ‘The three actors who play Sherlock Holmes? I heard you got together now you’re all filming in London at the same time. Do you have a message for the murderer?’

  ‘No. We don’t.’

  ‘So you refuse to condemn the killing?’ Typical bloody journalist. Sefton had always liked Flamstead: too smart ever to give a quote that didn’t have some side to it; horny as fuck. The idea of him getting together for drinks with Alice Cassell, who played the US TV version of Sherlock Holmes, which was normally set in Los Angeles, but was also filming three episodes in London at the moment, and with Ben Speake, the Shakespearean actor who was the star of a series of knockabout comedy Sherlock Holmes movies out of Hollywood, the latest of which was also filming in London now, to talk about the murder . . . well, he saw why the news was leading with this, but come on, at this length? Bank raiders actually caught, Star Wars, all that?

  ‘Being just some bloke, I do not have the authority to condemn the killing. I feel desperately sorry for Mr Lassiter’s family. I never want murders to happen. OK?’

  A week ago, the same media outlets had been saying that ‘Holmesmania’ had been ‘gripping the capital’, with groups of fans of each of the three versions location-hunting across London and gathering to scream at a press call with all three actors in deerstalkers. (Flamstead and Cassell had been rolling their eyes at theirs, which their characters never wore.) The media had immediately made the connection: ‘Rache’ had also been scrawled on the wall in blood in the first Holmes novel.

  Sefton had followed the case distantly, certain SC&O1 would have someone they fancied for it and were just taking the time they needed to put the case together. If killers, in the wake of the Ripper murders this summer, had taken to scrawling things on walls again, especially in what could well be their own blood, so much the better, because it provided an immediate supply of DNA.

  The next item on the news was something about an injury to a footballer. The foiled bank raid was mentioned fourth, by which point Sefton was making amazed gestures at the radio. He sank back in his seat as he heard the bare details. It all sounded kind of puny now. Damn it. He’d been hoping this small success would be the hammer he needed to start fixing his friends.

  ‘Wasn’t that great?’ Sefton, trying to project a sense of pride and accomplishment, strode into the Portakabin across the road from Gipsy Hill police station. This served as the ops room for the four-person team that everyone in the Met who didn’t work at Gipsy Hill assumed were an elite unit. ‘Successful operation.’ He gestured at the makeshift ops board made of cork. Every point on the operational objectives list had been circled as having been achieved. ‘Suspect in custody, being left to stew, waiting until we officially offer him a deal, because his team thoroughly ratted on him. We’re saying to the Met mainstream, “Hey, our existence is justified, here’s a crime you can understand, and oh, by the way, it’s solved.” What could be better?’

  The three other members of his team were standing apart from one another, looking off in different directions, like they were an indie band posing for an album cover. They all looked as if they had a long list of things that could be better.

  Sefton sighed. Costain and Ross he could understand. They’d had a relationship, and, because of an extraordinary betrayal of trust by Costain, it had fallen apart. Costain looked guilty; he moved guilty; he seemed angry with himself about that guilt, all the time. Ross, on the other hand, had frozen. Through occult means, in a fruitless attempt to get hold of something that might be able to free her dead father from Hell, she had sacrificed her future happiness, lost the basic ability to feel joy. Sometimes she’d pause for long moments after she was asked a question, as if the effort of answering might be too much. She and Costain came in every morning and didn’t speak to each other.

  Ross had recently been away for a week, taking a training course in statement analysis at the Dallas police academy. She’d been doing a lot of that, upskilling to be more of a tactical analyst, putting the team first as they got more and more into the detail of the London occult underworld. When she’d got back, Sefton had asked her about Dallas, what it had been like to be in a city where the Sight didn’t work. Surely, he’d asked, it must have been a relief to get a break? The look on Ross’s face as she’d just shrugged had told him that for her, there was no longer any such thing as a break.

  Those two Sefton might have been able to deal with, had it not been for Jimmy. Detective Inspector James Quill, immediately following a vastly successful operation, was currently rubbing his face, as if he was again dealing with a vast anger that Sefton had seen too much lately. He’d literally gone to Hell, and Sefton understood the fear that sometimes crossed his boss’s face, the stress that made him jerk at an unexpected sound. However, Sefton couldn’t shake the feeling there was something more to Quill’s pain. It was as if, for Quill, looking at the rest of them these days made his stress worse. A couple of times, when he’d been alone with Sefton, he’d started to say something and then stopped himself. It was as if he carried knowledge he couldn’t share, despite having briefed the rest of them on all the details of Hell. Whatever his secret was, it was a burden.

  OK, then. Moving forward. ‘We need to start looking for a new operation,’ said Sefton. ‘We need to at least start working out what we want to ask Ballard.’

  There was silence again. Nobody knew where to start. Nobody wanted to be here.

  Sefton walked with Lofthouse down the corridor that led to her office in Gipsy Hill police station. He was grateful as always that the four of them tended to get immediate access to their boss.

  ‘It’s not like Quill’s not talking,’ she said. ‘He told me about what he saw in Hell. Dear God.’ She led him in and closed the door behind them. ‘I debriefed Quill about Operation Dante – and now it occurs to me that he named the bank job that and I never even called him on it.’ She put her hand on her desk as if to steady herself. Was Sefton wrong, or was there a burden on her shoulders too? Of all of them, their boss should be the one with the least tension, not having the Sight herself, but benefiting from their success, getting good word of mouth across the Met, but . . . no, this was also someone who wasn’t sleeping too well.

  He waited for her to sit before doing so himself. ‘I wanted to, ma’am.’ He had something big to ask of her, and he felt the need for formality. ‘Thing is, in the old days he kept up such a brave face I thought maybe
it was a good thing he’d made a joke out of it.’

  ‘Such jokes do not ease his pain now, though, do they?’

  ‘That’s what I wanted to meet with you about, ma’am. This unit might have just had a major success as far as the mainstream Met is concerned, making it, I’m sure, a lot easier for you to defend our funding, but I can’t see how we can go forward. I can’t see how we’re going to work together again. Dante basically fell into our laps. We separated into our specialities, and we didn’t have to interact much beyond stuff we’d done a hundred times before. The next time something from our world comes along, something that pushes us, that demands we rely on each other . . . excuse my French, ma’am, but’ – and there went the formality – ‘we’ll be fucked.’

  ‘I had rather begun to realize all the above myself. Do you have some new options for me?’

  Sefton took a deep breath. ‘You’ve been helping us all this time without sharing the experiences that got us here. You believe us when we tell you about impossible things. You’ve asked us not to question you about it. Clearly you know something about hidden London. Clearly you knew the Continuing Projects Team, the guys who, we presume, used to be our sort of law in this town.’ He remembered the personnel file with her name on it they’d found in the ruins of the CPT’s headquarters in Docklands. Since then, Lofthouse had refused, incredibly, to discuss the matter with them. Quill had said she’d intimated that was the price of her continuing to let them operate. ‘We’re at the end of our tether, ma’am. Anything you can add to our knowledge would help.’

  Lofthouse closed her eyes.

  ‘It’s time for you to come clean with us, ma’am.’

  He thought for a moment that she was going to yell at him, but no. She was fighting some internal battle. Finally, she managed to look at him again. ‘Do you know,’ she asked, ‘when the temple building you found in Docklands was destroyed?’

  Sefton felt bemused at this sudden turn. She sounded like she didn’t know. Which was contrary to what he’d assumed about her involvement with the CPT. ‘We can only say it was after a certain date, five years ago, when the records cease. Everyone who talks about the old law says the CPT seem to have stopped presiding over London around then.’