by Paul Cornell
She found herself quite naturally in the company of one Jack Glassman, a mutual friend, always in strangely ill-fitting suits, the perfect imperfection of one too rich to care. She waited until his girlfriend headed to the bathroom. ‘We don’t have much time,’ she said. ‘I’m not joking. Keep the look on your face calm, like you’re listening to me making small talk.’
His eyes lit up. Oh God, he thought she was going to proposition him. ‘OK.’
‘You’re an antiques dealer, right? The leading one in the south of England, I’ve heard. So I’m betting there’s something dodgy about you, something somewhere way down in the detail of your properties, accounts, procedures, something you might not even be aware of, that you wouldn’t want opened up to, say, multiple dawn raids.’
To his credit, he kept that slight smile, though the sparkle in his eyes became something very different. ‘Are you warning me . . . ?’
‘No, I’m threatening you. Here’s another assumption I’m going to make about you: you know what I’m talking about when I say I want to see something that can’t be seen.’
‘What?’
If he genuinely didn’t have the faintest idea what she was talking about, then she’d just threatened a powerful member of the public for no good reason. Then she could say goodbye to her pension, and to her husband’s life. It was ironic that Quill’s team had in custody, in the form of Ballard, an individual who could, no question, provide her with what she was after. But to access him, to let him out to get what she needed, would require official communications that whatever was inside her husband would doubtless notice. She had to do this through back channels.
‘You’ve seen an enormous number of objects with London history to them. You know there’s something . . .’ She realized she was on the edge of sounding weak. She moved her head closer and dropped her voice to a whisper. ‘Don’t you fuck with me. You know what I mean.’
He did. She could see it. It scared him, and it scared him that she knew. He glanced around the room, and she took the moment to see Peter still chatting away. ‘If I did . . . ?’
‘Then find me an item that lets the user see things that aren’t otherwise there. Deliver it to me at Gipsy Hill nick. Do not email me, do not text me, do not call me. That’ll be an end to the matter, and I . . .’ She allowed just the slightest hint of possibility into her voice. ‘I will owe you one.’
His sudden intake of breath and curt nod were very satisfying.
NINE
‘What the fuck are we looking at?’ Ross stepped back from the most crowded ops board she’d ever seen. The small assassin from The Sign of Four had been added to it, by way of a still from the CCTV camera footage, with a suspect line connecting him to Bates, who was still himself similarly connected to the first two murders. ‘It’s like every time something new happens, a firework display of data points goes off.’ The chart did indeed look like a fractal explosion, with unconnected data pinned everywhere. Added to it had been the news that the astronomical photos and charts had been ordered from an online astronomy shop via PayPal, an account the investigation of which led through several loops to a dead end.
‘We’re going,’ deadpanned Costain, ‘to need a bigger board.’
‘At least,’ said Ross, ‘now we know this is continuing, we can stay one step ahead. I’ve read the next few books. There’s an earlier murder in A Study in Scarlet, but that’s in the US, and my searches find no trace of anything like it in the last five years. There’s also an earlier murder in The Sign of the Four, as the original’s called, but that’s in India, and again, no sign.’
‘Because if this is about harvesting the power of sacrifice,’ said Sefton, ‘you’d need to be in a city of the Sight to do so. Probably London, if this is all about Sherlock Holmes.’
‘My wife,’ said Quill, ‘mentioned Arthur Conan Doyle. I mean as a suspect.’
He’d been looking very distracted, twitchy, pacing. It was like he was building to something. It was making all of them nervous.
‘Good thought,’ she said. She wondered if Sarah, who’d impressed her in the past, was managing to help with Quill’s current situation. She printed out a picture of Conan Doyle and added him to the board.
‘He would also be a ghost,’ said Costain. ‘So we’ve got a ghost murdering a ghost.’
‘Wait a sec . . .’ Sefton had been looking at his phone, watching the video they’d taken of the flickering corpse of Holmes. ‘Yeah, look.’
They gathered round to see. He’d frozen it at a moment when the ever-changing face of the sprawled figure was that of a distinguished-looking Victorian. ‘Conan Doyle isn’t remembered by London separately. I mean, you know, where would you expect to find him? Nowhere specific. He’s not remembered as doing any particular thing apart from creating Holmes, so there he is, mixed up with his creation. He’s part of the victim, and so, therefore, unless we’re dealing with something bogglingly existential here—’
‘We might be,’ said Ross. She didn’t want to take the name off the board, but she didn’t feel any particular enthusiasm towards the notion, not without further evidence. ‘What most gets to me is that Gipsy Hill nick could be used as a factor in this murder spree. It seems to me that the only reasonable possibility is that the killer or killers knew from the outset about our team’s existence and what we do, and deliberately caught our attention, purely in order so they could do the double: set up Bates as the killer of victim number two, in order to conceal their own identity or identities, then make sure we’re interested enough to bring Bates to a location that allowed his death to fit the pattern.’
‘You don’t think . . . ?’ Sefton had a sudden look of inspiration. Ross gestured for him to keep going. ‘They wouldn’t have killed Sherlock Holmes just to get our attention, would they?’
Ross found herself making the same sound of horrified realization that Costain did. ‘That makes so much sense.’ She gestured to the board. ‘Holmes is the odd one out, not killed in the manner of a Holmes story.’
‘It’s either that,’ said Sefton, ‘or our theory about these murders being payment for killing Holmes is correct, only the payment has to continue. It breaks the law of threes, lead lead up, lead up, then pow. But now I say it out loud, I think that’s actually a rule of comedy, not this shit.’ He rubbed his brow. ‘It’s weird what feels natural.’
‘What’s the next Conan Doyle book?’ asked Quill.
‘It’s not a book,’ said Ross. ‘It’s a collection of short stories, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.’ She went and got from her bag the paperback copy of The Complete Adventures that she’d bought. ‘The next few stories are “A Scandal in Bohemia”, “The Adventure of the Red-Headed League” and “A Case of Identity”.’
‘Is that publication order or how they are in the book?’
‘Both. Nothing like the events in those stories has happened yet. I’ve got search alerts set up for what happens in the first of those, which should be pretty easy to spot.’
Costain produced his own copy from his jacket. She felt her continuous irritation at him crank up by one notch. It was even the same edition. Like he wanted to check up on her conclusions. She was being irrational, she knew. That was another thing she hated about him. He made her irrational. ‘There isn’t a murder in that one, though, right?’
‘I think a murder or something equally big would be required for a sacrifice,’ said Sefton.
‘Yeah,’ said Ross quickly, ‘which is why I’ve got searches set up for “The Red-Headed League”, which also has no murders, and the same for “A Case of Identity” but a whole bunch more for “The Boscombe Valley Mystery”, in which someone is killed.’
‘But not in London,’ said Costain. ‘That’s set in Herefordshire. There’s someone found dead in Sussex in “The Five Orange Pips”, but then—’
Ross raised her hands. ‘I’ve already got searches . . .’ She found the annoyance overwhelming her. She couldn’t help it now. This had brought her to a
dead stop. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘who’s the analyst here?’
‘I’m not trying to . . .’ Costain put down the book. ‘I want us to work together.’
Ross wanted to say he should keep to his speciality and stop trying to cosy up to her. But before she could find any words, Sefton stepped between them. ‘If it is just murders in London,’ he said, ‘then we have an opportunity here. The killer or killers need to commit these crimes close to where they’re done in the original.’ He looked to Quill, addressing the whole room. ‘How about we find out where the next one’s going to be and just bloody nick them?’
Quill watched as Ross spread a map of London out on the table. Something in the back of his head was nagging at him, in that copper way, but he couldn’t focus on it, had to hope that the others working the case would bring it to light. Not that anything mattered . . .
He stamped on the thought. He had to keep going. At least until he worked out what he was missing.
‘Later on in “The Five Orange Pips”,’ said Ross, ‘there’s a drowning in the Thames, from the deck of a ship called the Lone Star. That’s the next death in London. So let’s check the references in the story and online, because the fans will have our job already, and see if we can sort out where on the river such a drowning might take place.’
Sefton looked something up on his phone. Quill saw him react in amazement at what he found. ‘The Lone Star,’ he said. ‘It’s a real ship. It’s on its way to London, gets here in three days.’
‘What?’ said Costain.
Quill found that he had to lean on the table. ‘It’s like . . . something can make enormous changes to reality.’ Was it like he’d said, that the death of Holmes was the start of . . . of the mere possibility of law, rules and meaning all falling apart? ‘How likely is it that a ship with that name would just happen to be coming to London, right on time for our murderer?’
Ross was glaring at him like she was going to slap him. ‘Enormous changes to reality my arse. Sir. It’s not that hard to change the name of a ship, and if our suspect can change reality, they could have killed the victims in the exact locations, not just nearby.’ She took out her own phone and checked online. ‘Government maritime service in Cardiff is what we’re after.’ After a few minutes, she had the answer. ‘Until last week, when somebody bought and renamed it, this Lone Star was called the Ocean Queen, a US-registered vessel, currently in Ostend. It was bought by a company called Missing Room Ltd, who will have a bloody paper trail that will lead to somewhere close to our killer.’ She went to the board and added all this with hard, swift strokes of marker. She stepped back from it and pointed. ‘We have just resolved that heap of chaotic shit into not just a solid lead but an opportunity to apprehend.’
At the end of her working day, Lofthouse walked out to the car park with Sally Rutherford, a civil servant out of the Home Office whom she’d got to know quite well. She’d come over today to aid Lofthouse in prepping for a presentation she was due to make on the future of policing at an international law-enforcement conference, the details of which to Lofthouse now seemed ridiculous. However, she also represented an opportunity. A package had arrived for Lofthouse that lunchtime at the Hill, with no return address. It had contained an object she intended to put to use as quickly as possible.
‘Sally,’ she said, ‘I was wondering if you could do me a favour? You see . . . I wish there was some other way to put this . . . I’m having an affair.’
Lofthouse hoped that, should a friend of hers say something similar to her, she wouldn’t greet the news with the openmouthed glee that Sally did. However, that was exactly the reaction she’d anticipated. Her friend swiftly recovered her composure. ‘Well, I’m flattered you’d choose to share this with me . . .’ She paused. ‘Why are you sharing this with me?’
‘Because I’m desperate, Sally. All my other friends love Peter. They don’t know me like you do. They wouldn’t understand that things have become . . . difficult.’
‘Are you OK? I mean, he isn’t . . . ?’
Lofthouse shook her head, as if to say that she didn’t want to go into the details. If this worked, she was going to have to spend a long time afterwards working to recover Peter’s reputation. Dear God, she hoped she could get to the point where that was what she was most worried about. ‘So I want you to text me in about ten minutes, maybe email me too, to say there’s something urgent you want to see me about, business, not personal, and then, about two hours later, if you could send me another message, saying thanks for coming over so late . . .’
Sally nodded and nodded, lapping it up. Having set up this cover, Lofthouse reasoned, she could use it several times if need be. If Peter found out what she’d said, she could say she’d needed to explain the tension between them. It was still true, thought Lofthouse, that if you wanted the world to know something, the best person to tell was a senior civil servant.
She waited in her car until Sally sent her the text, then replied to it saying she was on her way, switched off her phone and tablet, and drove quickly to Golders Green. She flashed her warrant card to thankfully the same caretaker and parked in the quad of the apartment block.
She made her way to where she knew the invisible door was, her briefcase clutched under her arm. She waited until an elderly man with a suspicious look on his face went into his flat carrying his shopping, then took what had been delivered to her out of its packaging. She took care snipping off the layer of bubble wrap that concealed it. Inside was a shape made of paper: a small off-white origami bird. The unsigned note that had come with it had indicated that it had been made in London for the novelist Dennis Wheatley by one Rollo Ahmed. Lofthouse gently took the bird by one wingtip and, in the absence of instructions, held it in front of her as she approached the worrying place where she assumed the door of the missing apartment number 23 to be. She ignored the complex sensations and inched the bird forwards. The key on her charm bracelet reacted as it had before. The paper bird must now be near the door.
The bird suddenly, impossibly, moved. It leaped from her hand, spent a moment moving swiftly up and down, as if aiming itself, then instantly flattened itself again, becoming a white square that seemed to hang in . . . no, not in space, but against a door, which she could now dimly perceive, like a projected image overlaid on reality. It still distorted everything around it, it was still hard to look at, and Lofthouse was sure she felt something creaking, as if the piece of paper was soaking up enormous architectural stresses.
She took a moment to breathe properly. She looked down at a tug on her wrist. Her charm bracelet was being pulled towards the door by the key, which was pointing at it like it was magnetized.
She took a look at the ordinary lock that hung like a phantom in front of her. No great security required, not here, with a guard on the gate. She looked right and left, then took the crowbar from her briefcase, slipped it into the edge of the phantom door and threw all her weight against it. It took a lot of heaving, and she was sure she’d get reported to the gatehouse, but what for, exactly? Madwoman, police officer, attacking a wall. Because as she saw with a step or two back, the door was only visible when she was close enough. She returned to her task, and the door finally flew open, leaving the piece of paper hanging in the air in the revealed doorway.
She tried to look inside and found it sickening, then bloody made herself do it anyway. It was like looking at one of those Escher paintings through some sort of stereoscopic viewer. She was seeing at least two things at once. The piece of paper, though, provided perspective. She got the feeling it was sorting out what she could see. She made herself step inside.
It was like falling asleep and starting to dream. Her conscious brain kept trying to haul one part of the room over to join with another part, to make sense, and that kept making her stumble, like she was on a ship’s deck that was rocking from side to side in all possible directions. She was inside what looked like images of walls, floor, ceiling, objects, projected onto whiteness, and not
sorted properly, hanging askew from each other. Presumably this was the best the piece of paper could do in the face of . . . She could feel it, now she thought of it, a tremendous power trying to erase this place from her mind. It wasn’t like being in one’s own dream, then, but like being in that of a giant, and it felt like he might at any moment wake up. She looked over to the piece of paper and saw that its edges were starting to char. That must be a visual representation of that power getting to it, using up its resources. She had minutes at the most.
She ignored how skewed her senses were and let her training take over. What sort of place was this? A rich person’s grace-and-favour apartment, small but tasteful, now lost to the world. She felt she should recognize it. She must have been here. To think about that would make the paper burn more quickly; she felt that instinctively as her brain pushed at the idea. She dismissed trying to remember. She had to quickly search the place.
Where first? The key on her wrist tugged her towards just one place: the desk. She swiftly followed the call. It was like a blown-apart diagram of a desk, inside out and back to front. She went to it, found the drawers, didn’t want to throw the contents out for fear she’d lose them in the void. Just a few mementos. There was a locked drawer, with items inside: she could see them inside the desk. The key was straining at the leash. She broke the desk open and really could see, in a way that she hadn’t before. Better. A sheaf of folded papers. The key swung about them like a compass needle. This was all it wanted. She dropped the papers into her briefcase. That was it for the desk.
Was there anything around here the key would fit into? She couldn’t see any possibilities. The key was ancient and everything here was modern. There was a wall safe. The key wasn’t interested – it had what it had come for – but she was. She went to the safe.
It was closed, a numerical tumbler. Her crowbar wouldn’t do for that, and if she had once known the combination, as it seemed likely she might, then she’d certainly be prevented from remembering it now. It was a six-figure combination. Could she apply the same logic she’d used to find the door? The strange pressure she felt in this room seemed animal, blunt; it didn’t feel like it could react strategically.