by Paul Cornell
‘What?’
‘Oh,’ said Ross, realizing. She should have thought of this. ‘He’s wondering if what happened to you on the boat was attempted murder.’
‘But . . . were there two deaths in that story? Or is the next murder in the stories on the river too?’
‘No to both,’ said Ross. ‘The attack on you was an anomaly. I thought you were reading ahead?’
Costain looked awkward. ‘Got a bit bored with it,’ he said.
‘I’m not saying that Klan members wouldn’t just do that for fun,’ said Sefton.
‘But they did go out of their way,’ agreed Costain. ‘No, I’ve never played Sherlock Holmes. I wasn’t the sort for school plays.’
They all looked round at the sound of Quill arriving. He looked pale, like he hadn’t slept. ‘Today,’ he said, ‘today, I think one of you better lead, because I am just . . .’ He looked as if he was appealing to them to say he was unfit for work, to let him off the hook.
They all went to him. ‘Jimmy,’ said Ross, ‘please, just tell us?’
He shrugged off their expressions of concern, shook his head, sat down. ‘Could one of you, please . . . ?’
‘All right,’ said Costain. ‘You get yourself together, Jimmy. We’re here for you. Next move: we interview the Lone Star crew.’
They actually had a one-way mirror at Wapping High Street nick, like in American cop shows. Ross and Quill watched from the next room as Sefton and Costain played good cop and bad cop. Ross had been worried about Costain conducting the interview, but he stayed within the bounds of the law, satisfied, it seemed, to have got a reaction out of the men when he walked in. They hadn’t expected their victim. That had been just about their only reaction, though.
‘I should go in there,’ said Quill. ‘I’d fucking show them.’
‘No, sir,’ said Ross, and after a glare, he backed down. The idea that the mercenaries had powerful connections, plus the previous death in custody, had been enough to sell the Met mainstream on the policy of keeping them in maximum security between interviews, guarded round the clock. It was the only way Ross could think of of guarding against rescue from someone who could walk through walls.
In the end, the interviews were among the most fruitless she’d ever witnessed. Sefton, being black, wasn’t actually that great, with these bastards, at being the good cop. He tried the bell trick and established that these gentlemen didn’t have the Sight, but that was about all they got.
When they got back to the Portakabin, Ross went to the ops board and looked at it. It was laughing at her. She inclined her head, literally looking at it from another angle. Once again, it was one of those puzzle pictures in which you could feel the shape of something lurking. Had the ‘death’ of Holmes really been just to get them involved? What sort of mind thought that far ahead? A chess player, a planner. An adversary for her.
She could just about see the edges of who she was dealing with. One person, yeah, someone who employed others, but a mind behind it all. Her thoughts drifted once again, as they had often that day, to her and Costain maybe going to the auction, the possibility of her regaining her happiness. She pushed the idea away. That was going to keep distracting her until she’d sorted it. There were no killings in the next two stories, ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’ and ‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle’, but the one after that included a murder that immediately presented a strategy to entrap the killer, or at least to prevent the next killing.
She set to work on the wheezing office PC and got a notice prepared for printing. The other two were fruitlessly trying to talk to Quill over strong, sweet tea. She picked up the first copy from the printer and read it out. ‘“Have you ever played Sherlock Holmes? In amateur dramatics, at school, anywhere? If so, we want to hear from you. Production company seeks anecdotes. Big money paid.”’ There followed the Portakabin phone number. ‘Of course, they’ll discover there’s no money involved when we interview them. They’ll have to be content with a police warning to flee and save their lives.’
‘Are you going to put this out all over London?’ asked Quill. He sounded incredulous, at his wits’ end. Ross wanted to get him into an interview room and find out what he was hiding from them.
‘No,’ she said patiently. ‘The next story takes place in a very specific setting, the village of Stoke Moran, “on the western border of Surrey”. That’s not a real place, but Holmes fans online seem to agree that it’s standing in for Stoke d’Abernon, which is just inside the M25, and thus hopefully still counts as London. I reckon we can leaflet every house, get the whole community onside and thus make it extremely hard for our opponents to do what they have to do next.’
‘Which is?’ asked Sefton.
‘Kill someone by means of a poisonous snake.’
Sefton and Costain exchanged looks that said that for them the game was still very much afoot. Even Quill managed a raised eyebrow.
‘Whoever we’re playing against,’ she continued, ‘now knows that we’re anticipating their moves, so we can do all this in the open. The bastards will still have to try to go through with it.’
‘That’s where the Chelsea training ground is,’ said Sefton. ‘Shit. Maybe one of the players once put on a deerstalker for a comedy sketch.’
Ross instinctively wanted to shy away from doing what she was about to do next, but, after a glance towards Quill, she went through with it. She would have to do more than just offer options now, if Quill wasn’t prepared to take the lead. ‘The other thing that’s urgent is that now we know that people who played Holmes are the targets, we’re looking at three enormous examples of that who are in danger right now: Gilbert Flamstead, Alice Cassell and Ben Speake. A high-profile kill might be what this is all working towards. I’ve been emailing their production companies, and getting a perhaps unsurprising degree of cooperation, given all the media attention. I reckon if we can talk to them, we can demonstrate that what the news is now saying is true: that there’s a clear link between the victims and them. We might be able to persuade them to go home. Or their insurance companies could.’
‘Also,’ said Costain, ‘if any of them are planning a trip to Stoke d’Abernon—’
‘Let’s hope they are, and we can stop them, and thus all this.’ She suddenly realized that she was now talking directly to Costain again, and that Sefton had smiled to see that. She pressed on. ‘So, Jimmy, I reckon the undercovers should go down to Stoke . . .’
‘So we don’t get to hobnob with the rich and famous?’ said Sefton.
‘. . . start the leafleting, but also get in with the locals, like undercovers do best. There are details in the short story they can check for any signs of. Our killer or killers obviously don’t need to get all the details straight, but they like to when they can. Meanwhile, Jimmy and I will try to get a meeting with the three Sherlocks. What do you reckon?’ She looked to Quill for assent.
‘Yeah,’ he nodded, too quickly, as if he didn’t want to think about anything. ‘Great.’
That afternoon, Sefton and Costain caught a train out of Waterloo. Sefton was pleased to see it was one with the grimy old sort of carriages that actually still had compartments. He and Costain sat facing each other on the threadbare seats that had that peculiarly satisfying London smell about them, like a particular sort of carpet cleaner was only just fighting back decades of commuter sweat. That smell, for Sefton, was close to being a thing of the Sight. The further he got into this stuff, the more he learned, the better he could see that the everyday things of London were part of a spectrum that led to the hidden world, not cut off from it on the other side of a curtain, as the others tended to say. Sefton threw his overnight bag onto the rack beside Costain’s, glad that he’d included his holdall of occult London paraphernalia, though it added to the weight of his share of the leaflets. They sat in silence, watching the construction sites outside Waterloo as the train accelerated. ‘So,’ said Sefton, ‘you and Lisa . . .’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, mate, I hope we can, ah, contribute to that.’ His sudden grin faded. ‘Listen, I don’t mean I just want to get with her again. I want to make things right.’
‘I know you do.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah. I can see both sides. I always have. I know Quill used to think you were still a bent copper, but . . . I know your heart’s in the right place.’
‘Because of all your’ – Costain gestured in the air – ‘your hoo-ha.’
‘I wouldn’t call it that around Lisa. No, it doesn’t take any London shit to see you both did what you thought was best. It’s not like you used that thing Ross found to save yourself.’
Costain paused, looking taken aback by the vote of confidence. Sefton got the feeling it had been a long time since anyone had said anything positive to Costain. ‘Tell me about you and that stuff. How’s it going?’
‘My hoo-ha, you mean?’ Sefton found that he was really kind of pleased that someone other than his boyfriend was asking him about what he did. So, hesitantly, he started to fill Costain in on what he hadn’t always shared every detail of with the others, about the mad places he’d gone, just how far out he’d ventured in order to bring back information. Costain was, of course, being a fellow undercover, a great listener.
Stoke d’Abernon turned out to be not really a quaint little village but a commuter-belt town that was still trying to be said village, meaning most of those who lived here went to out-of-town shops. There was a lot of greenery among the winding closes of upmarket estates, and not much in the way of store fronts. The row of shops by the station included a swimming-pool supplier. The endless spirals of housing revealed by Google Maps were going to take bloody ages to leaflet. There was, however, at least a radio car firm on call, so Sefton and Costain got picked up and taken to the Woodlands Park Hotel, a sprawling mansion that had that cosy, clean-carpeted feel of a non-chain hotel in a well-heeled suburb.
Sefton threw his bags onto the bed in his room, went to his window and looked back in the direction of London. This was the furthest he’d gone from the centre since they’d got the Sight. He could feel the enormity of it in perspective from here. It was like a distant storm. He could see, as his experienced eyes sought them out, details in the air above the metropolis: the ghosts of barrage balloons, the nightmares of the Blitz, even now. That memory, of the dead as well as the living, must make it harder for the capital to be as cosmopolitan as it was, must contribute to the creeping fear of outsiders, of difference, that Sefton saw everywhere these days. British xenophobia had mutated so white Europeans with different accents were seen as people who weren’t quite people. What wasn’t often said, though, was that Britons of colour like Sefton and Costain were also included in that feeling. Too difficult to say, but at the same time too obvious to mention. Speaking of which, there was one factor that Ross hadn’t considered in her operational plan, which was how two young gentlemen such as they might be received in the leafy shires. He and Costain, without consulting each other about it, had both come along in smart casual, like they were here for a weekend of golf or an out-of-town stag do.
He went downstairs and found Costain already in the bar, already talking to a couple of local older chaps. He’d put a note of white-collar precision into his voice, was purring about his independent television production company . . . Oh, he was the owner of their cover story, was he? OK, then. He was showing the leaflet around. Oh yes, he was here on business, not just to work on his tan. Big laugh. Christ, were they going there tonight? Costain spotted him at the entrance to the bar and beckoned him over. ‘This is Kevin, my producer. Shall we get these fine gentlemen a drink, Kevin?’
Sefton shook hands all round and saved a wry glance for Costain, who gave him a genuine smile back. Even if Quill was suffering and distant, thought Sefton, as he headed to the bar, at least the rest of the team were slowly drawing back together.
‘Can I get you anything?’ The PA was looking at Quill like she’d never seen a real copper before. He wanted to say ‘salvation’, like he was in a TV show himself. But he wasn’t built that way, and that’d also start Ross off on worrying about him again. Ross allowed him only a moment’s silence before answering for them, ordering two cups of strong, sweet tea.
They were in a lobby constructed inside the entrance of an old warehouse in Southwark, which was now home, according to the list on the wall behind the reception desk, to five companies, ranging from the rentable TV studios they were visiting today to games developers and design firms. Quill had always loved this part of London, which on the way in had shown even more of itself to him, now he had the Sight. The authenticity of the place had somehow survived it becoming a tourist area, so now the streets were hyped up and utterly London, but real too.
There was phantom detail by every paving slab, and notably in clouds of exclamation around the cathedral, where the flames of the Great Fire raged like shadow puppetry. There had been one of the great annual fairs here, and London seemed to remember those particularly. Southwark had been a kind of Hong Kong to the capital, a place just outside the original jurisdiction, where a certain amount of bad behaviour was allowed. The patterns of money and violence had made a whirlpool here. The Sight sometimes gave one pleasure like this; it wasn’t all darkness. But Quill found, to his disappointment, that now he couldn’t see the beauty as anything other than meaningless. The thoughts that went round and round kept dragging him down.
He saw Ross looking at him and made a conscious effort to engage. He recognized that it wasn’t just Hell and his own depression that were getting to him; there was something going on in his copper brain too. It was working at something they’d missed, but he didn’t yet know what.
‘Ah, Detective Inspector Quill?’ The face of someone Quill assumed he knew had appeared round the corner of an office door. It took him a moment to realize it was someone famous. It was Gilbert Flamstead. Him off the telly, in his long dark coat and very white shirt. Sherlock Holmes.
Once again Ross replied for them, but this time it was because Quill had lost the power of speech.
Flamstead took them to a Portakabin that was rather better equipped than the one Quill was used to, having been made into a production office, with coffee maker, and posters on the walls. He let a beautiful young lady who was some sort of personal assistant do most of the talking. It turned out that Flamstead had been the first to hear of Lofthouse’s request for a meeting, from his executive producer at the BBC. He’d taken the liberty of assembling his fellow Sherlocks, which was why Alice Cassell and Ben Speake also soon arrived. Cassell was looking almost deliberately rough, in stressed jeans and hooded sweater. Speake was either still in costume or always wore to police interviews boots, waistcoats and the sort of shirt that got poets drowned. All three of the actors were surprisingly short, and thinner than human beings were meant to be. It was, Quill thought, like addressing a group of Hobbits.
Along for the ride was the executive producer of Cassell’s show, Felix Lindt, a clean-cut young man in very new jeans who didn’t look old enough to be in charge of six seasons of a top-rated US TV series. The other two had done without entourages, though it was clear Flamstead, the gracious host, was on his home territory, this being where his show rented studio space.
Quill cleared his throat. ‘So, as my email said,’ he began, ‘there is now a clear, if unspecific, threat to your lives.’
‘Alice and I have been having a conversation about packing up and going home,’ said Lindt, sounding as if that would be much his preferred option. ‘If you think that would be—’
‘That conversation ended,’ underlined Cassell immediately, ‘with the decision that we only had two more weeks here to finish the three-parter, and that, with extra security, I would stay and get that done. I speak for myself, OK? He’s always trying to control what I do.’
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‘Well,’ laughed Lindt, with a lightness that sounded like it was born of bitter experience, ‘I am, kind of, you know, your boss.’
She looked shocked at him. ‘You said you’d never go there.’ She held up a hand to stop his protestations and turned back to Quill. ‘I guess he’s trying to protect me. Or the studio’s investment.’
‘Alice, I would never think of you like—’
‘I get death threats, threats of rape every single frigging day. Shitheads who think they own Sherlock Holmes, who don’t think I should play her. This new threat? Same old same old.’
‘Is it . . . Shirley Holmes in your case?’ Ross had read up on the respective series and had expressed the view on the way over that a young white woman these days being called Shirley was so bizarre they might as well have stayed with Sherlock.
‘Shy, usually,’ said Lindt, ‘Shy Holmes. It sounds more contemporary.’ He indicated Cassell. ‘Can you believe it? She’s Shy.’
‘I’m a grown woman. I’m not running. OK?’
‘Good for you, Ally,’ said Speake. There was something a little Californian in the handsome middle-aged man’s accent, a weird transatlantic awkwardness to his East End tones. In the movies, he was full-on plummy thespian. Presumably this was what he thought of as his authentic voice. It was as if he’d literally forgotten what a real British person sounded like. ‘Fuck ’em and their ways. We ain’t for moving.’
‘Well, given you two are so laid-back about it, I so completely disagree,’ said Flamstead. The others laughed.
‘What Gilbert means is that we understand the threat,’ said his PA, ‘and none of us wants to make your job harder. We’d all like to help.’
‘The show must go on,’ said Speake, as if he was coining a new truism.
‘Did any of you ever work with Erik Gullister?’ asked Quill.
‘Yeah,’ said Cassell, ‘just for a few days. He was a grieving father on Dear Alibi, about a decade ago. I was his daughter. Good actor. Never had any luck.’