Who Killed Sherlock Holmes?

by Paul Cornell

  ‘I gather, from what you’ve all told me about previous operations,’ said Lofthouse, ‘that it must take a great deal of energy and concentration on someone’s part to make everybody forget the Continuing Projects Team?’

  ‘That’s correct. We haven’t been able to discover anything else about them. It’s like they’ve been erased from history, except for their pictures, left at the site, we think, as a demonstration of that power.’

  ‘Right.’ She seemed to have decided something, but it wasn’t a pleasant decision. From the look on her face, it meant a whole world of tough choices. ‘That’ll be all, Detective Constable.’

  Sefton was amazed. ‘But—’

  She gave him a look that dared him to make her repeat herself.

  When Sefton had left, Rebecca Lofthouse let out a long breath and put both hands on her desk. She did the breathing exercises to make herself calm, the ones she’d been using since just before she’d visited Quill’s team in Docklands, when they’d been exploring the ruins of the ‘temple’ of the Continuing Projects Team. That had been the point when horror had entered her life. That horror had known what she was going to discover when she visited them. She had already made attempts to do something about her situation: slightly; quietly. She’d thought she’d moved covertly, but if, as she’d been told during the Russell Vincent case, MI5 had noticed what she’d been up to, then, she was sure, so could the terrible power that was watching over her.

  Now things had to change. Sefton’s visit had crystallized a feeling she’d had herself. For the sake of James Quill and his team, she had to start taking some risks.

  A week later, at the end of another working day that had been devoted to tidying up the loose ends of Operation Dante, Quill stopped his car outside his semi-detached house in Enfield and shut off the engine. He hesitated, as always these days, before going inside. He just needed to take a moment, to prepare for the role he had to play at home. He had to appear to be a jolly daddy for Jessica and reassure the continually worried Sarah that he was OK.

  It’s everyone who ever lived in London.

  That was what the sign above the entrance to Hell had said. He saw it in his memories every day. He had so many questions. He worried about what that meant in practice. He’d seen, in Hell, people from all time periods. Did ‘everyone’ include visitors to London? Was one night at a Holiday Inn in Clapham enough to sentence you to eternal damnation? Better act like that was the case. Some of those in Hell had thought, in their confused way, that there’d been other sorts of afterlife before, that this was a recent change. Could it change back?

  He hadn’t told anyone. He couldn’t bring himself to. On his journey home tonight, he’d seen the usual horrors of hidden London. They seemed obvious now, meaningless. They were nothing compared to what was waiting.

  He got out of the car, went and unlocked his front door, and when he heard Jessica calling from inside, he made himself not think about what the things in Hell would do to her. He made himself not think, as he did, over and over, that there was nothing he could do to prevent it. Instead, he forced himself to smile.

  ‘Laura called.’ Sarah had that expression on her face again as they made dinner: busy, happy engagement. It was one she’d held on to for weeks. When Quill had first come back to life, had literally returned from Hell, she’d waited for a while, then had gently begun asking lots of questions, trying to get him to talk. He’d burst into tears, the first time, then yelled at her to stop. The tears hadn’t come back, but the yelling had. Over the weeks, her questions had fallen away, and she was now being supportive, hoping he’d come to her. She would wait forever. He was angry all the time. He was full of fight or flight, waiting, every moment, for a blow that might kill him, might send him to Hell again. He had thought he was brave. He wasn’t. His depression . . . well, he didn’t know where that began and actual sanity ended now, because now there genuinely was no future. The previous evening, she’d carefully asked him about the end of the operation, and he’d done what he’d started to do instead of yelling, played the part of himself to talk to her, talked about how pleased the team all were.

  ‘Oh,’ he said now, ‘how’s she doing?’

  Laura was Sarah’s sister, who lived in Inverness and worked in computers. Quill had known her, when he’d first met Sarah, as Derek. There had been an awkward phone call before the wedding. ‘Mate, listen, I’ve got a favour to ask. I want to come to the wedding as . . . OK, this is complicated, so I’m just going to say it. I’m having a sex change. That’s not what they call it these days, but that’s what I call it. By the time the wedding comes round, I’m going to be living as a woman. Is that OK?’

  Quill had thought for a moment that Derek had been joking, but no. ‘Does Sarah know?’

  ‘Not yet. I wanted to talk to you first.’

  ‘It sounds,’ Quill had said, ‘like you and I are going to need a few pints of therapy.’

  When they went out, Quill had asked loads of questions, as coppers did, interested in someone who was doing such an extraordinary thing. He’d had a bit of awareness training back in the day, but this was a mate. Derek had finally told Sarah everything. Sarah had been angry about Derek talking to Quill first, but Quill had seen the situation as a sign that he was getting on with her family, and had talked and talked about it, to the point where the siblings had told him he could stop. He’d made sure Laura, as she now was, was welcome at the wedding.

  Now, they went out for a pint when Laura was in London, though Laura’s capacity for alcohol had declined a bit, and largely talked about Scottish soccer, of which Laura had an extraordinary knowledge. Every now and then, though, Laura would, a bit deliberately, move the conversation to wider topics, in a way that Derek hadn’t. Quill had got the feeling she’d been freed, and did his best to join in, though there were times he wanted to say that maybe Sarah should have come along too. He’d started to refer to her, a couple of pints in, as his ‘best mate’, which she probably was now that Harry had gone, but at one point, Laura had corrected him and said, ‘Best friend?’ Quill had nodded. So he now had a best friend who wore dresses and make-up, and sometimes tried to get him to appreciate fabrics. He hadn’t seen her since he’d got the Sight, and the idea of going out with her and talking about her stuff and not at all about the depth of shit he’d got lost in seemed like it could be a blessed relief.

  ‘She’s fine,’ said Sarah. ‘She’s had a promotion. She’s coming down at the weekend.’

  ‘Great.’ There was that momentary ache about the possibility that the sign over Hell’s doorway also referred to visitors to London, but no, he could choose not to believe that.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Sarah. ‘She’s house-hunting. She’s moving to London.’

  In his tiny flat above a shop in Walthamstow, Kev Sefton had finally managed to get to sleep, his boyfriend, Joe, snoring soundly as always beside him. The background noise of London at night strayed in through the window, which was still open, just about, the first cool of autumn making the curtain flap.

  Sefton was dreaming tension dreams, his legs working at the duvet. Behind his eyes, he was looking up into the pleading face of . . . It wasn’t quite the actor who played Sherlock Holmes, with the posh accent and the dextrous fingers. Sefton knew, in the way one knows things in dreams, that this was no actor; this was something from the heart of London itself, something with the weight that sometimes crashes into dreams. This man had crashed in, desperate, panting, and was scrabbling at Sefton’s shirt, not trying to get it off – this wasn’t going to be that sort of dream, no matter what his mind tried to make it. The man was trying to make Sefton understand something. Oh, it was Sherlock Holmes, the real Sherlock Holmes! (Was Sherlock Holmes real?) He needed him; he was crying out. Sefton couldn’t understand what he was saying. He was desperate; he was looking for help. The man turned and ran, down darkening streets, streets full of fog, shadows suddenly falling over him. Sefton pursued him. He ran round a corner and collided with .
. . with nothing. There was a gap, a gap where Sherlock Holmes should be, a gap in the air!

  Sefton fell through it and found himself falling—

  He woke up with a start, tense, his arms still flailing. Joe mumbled something beside him. Sefton let his breathing slow. When he’d been an undercover, he’d grown used to that sort of dream. He’d ignored them as obvious, not indicative, but now he was on the path to being . . . something else, something he didn’t have a name for, now he was always looking into the fine detail of hidden London, trying to find ways to leverage it for his team, maybe he should start paying more attention to what his unconscious was saying. He got out of bed and rubbed his forehead. What had that dream said? That Sherlock Holmes had gone. Well, you could interpret that as saying there was something missing in terms of the law. The dream could have been about the way Lofthouse had hustled him out of that meeting without providing him with anything that could help his friends.

  No, that was reading it like someone in a magazine advice column would read it, adding one too many layers of awake interpretation. The dream had said Sherlock Holmes had gone. A fictional character had . . . Oh, oh, now, wait a sec.

  Sefton went into the other room and found the holdall in which he kept all the gubbins he experimented with that was ‘very London’. He was hoping that soon Ballard’s collection would be added to it, if they could make a deal with him. All those lovely items yelling with the Sight that they’d found on him, all out of Sefton’s reach now, in evidence boxes. Sefton found a pendulum made of lead from a Roman sewer. He swung it gently. Sefton had been pondering, lately, what it was about the London-ness of an object that could possibly lead to it having any sort of power. It was ancient thinking, against science, that mere association could alter a physical object. So far, everything his team had found, while mind-boggling, had surrendered to rationality, in the end. Some sort of reason, some sort of natural law, must work for hidden London, or they wouldn’t have got as far as they had with the business of deduction, with logic. It was still their only way to salvation.

  He found a map of the Underground, unfolded it and spread it out on the carpet. He held the pendulum above it and let it swing. He closed his eyes, feeling for the tiniest deviation from the lean of the floor, and was sure, after a moment, that he felt something. He’d done this many times before, in many locations, to establish a norm. He always sat in the same way, programming his muscle memory to feel when there was any influence on the pendulum. Now there was something that was making his body recall that lurch in the dream, that moment of falling, as if . . . something or someone was indeed missing from London. He opened his eyes and watched the pendulum slowly subsiding and . . . glitching, by the tiniest jerk every time. He folded the paper several times, each time starting the lead swinging again, each time watching as it swung towards the same general area, until he thought, Yeah, it’s pretty obvious where I should go, isn’t it?

  He grabbed some clothes and went to find his car keys.

  Baker Street was still busy close to midnight, with people wandering from the Greek nightclub down the road, street sweepers clearing up, deliveries being made, the cold and the neon in the dark making Sefton think of approaching winter. The Sherlock Holmes Museum, which was actually at 237–41 Baker Street, but said 221B on the door, was a couple of shopfronts along from a pub called the Volunteer, which had only night lights on, the staff clearing up.

  Sefton had never been here before. The museum itself was a neat little frontage with Victorian lamps, a sign, a blue plaque visible beside a balcony on the second floor. It was so obviously artificial on this big, busy, modern street, a house conversion the fictional aspects of which dated back only to 1990, the point at which it had been decided that the chance to make a profit should take precedence over the reality. From Sefton’s Sighted point of view, it was like the mass consciousness of London had demanded the building exist.

  There was, thank God, a single light burning on a higher floor, otherwise, he realized, he’d have no way of getting in. He went and rang the doorbell, several times, and when a face appeared at the window above, he held up his warrant card.

  The interior of the museum was exactly what he’d expected, a ticket booth followed by a narrow staircase, with captions pointing out exactly how authentic every piece of bric-a-brac was. Sefton felt uneasy as one of the assistant curators, a petite young woman with a ponytail, who identified herself as Ann Stanley, led him upstairs to ‘Holmes’s flat’ on the first floor. Clean-up today, she’d told him, had taken longer than usual, so, exhausted, she’d made use of the small room the museum kept for staff to stay over. This was the sort of building Sefton and his team were getting used to exploring, with every detail of its history shouting at them because they had the Sight. Only, this one had been designed that way for ordinary people and had nothing of the actual Sight about it. No real home, even of an eccentric Victorian detective, would have this much significant detail. They’d laid it out like nobody ever threw anything out or cleaned up. The items on display were props, fakes. That was why it all felt so . . . nauseating, to someone with the Sight. None of these items sang with it as they should. The house felt . . . vulnerable, compromised, as if by laying out all these things that should have the weight of the Sight to them, it was inviting something terrible to happen that would lend them that property for real.

  The curator unlocked and let him into the ‘consulting room’, asking lots of questions, which suddenly Sefton couldn’t hear, because now all his attention was taken up with what was in the centre of the room. Between a settee and a bearskin hearth-rug there lay the body of a man. He wore a deerstalker and one of those short capes. He lay on his back, one arm stretched out in what looked like a helpless plea towards the smaller of two desks in the corners of the room. Sticking out of his chest was a straight knife with some sort of decoration on the blade. The weapon tugged at Sefton with the gravity of the Sight. It was the only thing here that did. Around the body had formed a pool of blood.

  ‘What’s that knife doing there?’ asked the curator, puzzled. She obviously couldn’t see the body, or her reaction would have been much more urgent.

  Sefton dared to take a step nearer and looked down into the face of the dead man only he could see, a face that was changing, shifting, continuously as Sefton watched. This was what had suddenly gone missing from London. His dream hadn’t required any interpretation. He was at a crime scene, and the crime was the murder of Sherlock Holmes.

  THREE

  It took little persuasion for the curator to accept that this was a crime scene. She’d seen enough procedural TV shows to understand that evidence could be invisible to the naked eye, and the knife in the floor had startled her. Everything had been normal, she said, when she’d locked up this room at around 11 p.m. Sefton got her to call her bosses, which meant her leaving a message on their answerphone. That was perfect, because it meant that, in the early hours, after first Quill and then Ross and Costain had arrived, and Sefton had interviewed the curator, taken her contact details and sent her home, the team had the place to themselves.

  Quill stared at the body, as if this was some mad joke being played on him. He looked, if possible, more burdened than ever. Before Sefton could ask if something had happened, he was all business. ‘Is he solid?’

  ‘No, Jimmy.’ Sefton demonstrated, sticking the toe of his shoe right through the body’s head. They all knew that the ‘ghosts’ formed by London ‘remembering’ a real or fictional character had varying degrees of solidity. This time, they couldn’t examine the corpse, couldn’t even turn it over. Sefton had already taken a lot of photos, using his phone, then checked that, to a Sighted person, the body did show up in them. The image of the body was still multifaceted, changing as you looked at it, changing with the angle. It was, Sefton had realized, a combination of all the different Sherlocks, all the different actors, including Speake, Flamstead and Cassell, loads he didn’t recognize, some in modern dress, many wear
ing the deerstalker and cape, which thus had a regular shape compared to the flickering of the rest of the image, and also a sort of pencilled version, which Sefton realized must be the strong memory created by the original illustrator of the Holmes stories, whose name Sefton couldn’t remember. That added a flavour that, after a moment, he realized reminded him of an ancient A-ha pop video. That thought had led to him filming the body on his phone, until he was sure he’d caught the full cycle of incarnations as they flickered by.

  ‘No habeas corpus, then,’ said Ross, which might have been a joke except there was, as ever, no humour in her expression.

  ‘How is this even possible?’ asked Costain, who looked like he might have wanted to make a few dark jokes himself, but was, as always now, restraining every expression of who he was for Ross’s sake.

  ‘Well,’ said Sefton, who’d had a while to think about this, ‘if you mean “How is there a Sherlock Holmes?”, then I think it’s obvious that there would be, or was, in our version of London. London remembers things that happened, but like we saw with the “most haunted house” at Berkeley Square, it equally remembers stuff that was just made up. Sherlock Holmes: a very popular fictional character with a huge link to London. A lot of people even think he’s real.’

  ‘There’s been “Holmesmania”, with the three versions filming at once in town, getting everyone thinking about it,’ said Ross. ‘It’s actually kind of obvious he’d be one of our “ghosts”.’

  ‘If you mean “How do you kill a ghost?”’ Sefton continued, ‘you’ve got me there.’

  ‘Why haven’t we seen him before?’ Costain had stepped closer to the body.