Who Killed Sherlock Holmes?

by Paul Cornell

  ‘How did you know it was Sherlock Holmes?’

  She looked at him like he was mad. ‘He was wearing a deerstalker and a little cape.’

  ‘Did you see his face?’ Sefton, not really believing what he was hearing, had got out his special notebook.

  ‘He was quite far away. I got an impression of . . . I was going to say he had a long nose, but I think perhaps now I’m just saying what he ought to look like, if you see what I mean.’

  Sefton’s mind was racing. Was this an encounter with the ‘ghost’ of Holmes after he’d been ‘killed’? Had he come back? Or would that be the ghost of the ghost? These days, he had to wrap his brain around thoughts as mad as that. Or was this just someone pretending to be Holmes? If so, here was a potential victim. Perhaps this guy was already lying dead in bed somewhere in this town, victim of a snakebite, his body as yet unfound. Or perhaps this was all just an old lady seeing things, or making something up.

  ‘Why did you say this was very strange?’

  ‘You mean, apart from meeting some random loony dressed like Sherlock Holmes in a park in the first light of dawn? It was what he did next. He started to . . . Well, it wasn’t exactly a dance. He saw I’d stopped and was watching him, and he started making these gestures with his arms. Very specific. He would raise his arms in a particular way, then lower them, then walk a couple of paces, then do a different shape. He did it over and over, the same patterns every time. He was like something out of Monty Python. When he started, I was going to call out to him and ask what he was doing, but then I got a bit scared, and wondered if I walked off, was he going to follow me? Because all the papers are full of Sherlock Holmes murders. So I was stuck there, rather.’

  ‘What did these gestures look like?’

  She bit her lip, clearly upset that she couldn’t remember offhand. ‘Go over there.’ She flapped her hand.

  Sefton walked back ten paces. Under her instructions, he raised and lowered his arms, until she was certain of each of the four poses the man had struck. Sefton drew what he’d been doing, then showed the old lady, who nodded eagerly. ‘What happened then?’

  ‘He bowed. Honestly. Then he walked off through those trees. I very much went the other way. When I got home a couple of minutes later, I was shivering. It was as if I’d encountered . . . it sounds silly, but . . . something supernatural.’

  ‘Ma’am, you’ve been really helpful. If I could just take your contact details, my colleague Lisa—’

  She shook her head. ‘I’ve told you all I know. I don’t want anyone calling.’

  Sefton tried a little more persuasion, but it clearly wasn’t going to get him anywhere. He’d made several notes about clues she’d given away to where she lived. He was pretty sure if they really needed to, they could find her. He thanked her and, once she’d gone, went over to the gap in the trees. He walked through it, looking more closely at the ground, and beyond it found only a further area of parkland. There was a fence that backed onto a row of houses with alleys in between.

  Sefton sniffed the air as he went and kept an eye out for traces of silver and gold. Nothing. He wouldn’t necessarily expect anything to remain after a few days, even if those weird gestures had been meant to achieve some supernatural effect. He felt intuitively that rain, of the sort he’d heard on his hotel window last night, would wash this stuff away, but this was another of the many things he didn’t yet know. Still, here was something meaningful, something potentially huge, and very weird.

  At an isolated table in the hotel bar that evening, Sefton showed Costain what he’d drawn in his notebook. ‘Is it a message?’ Costain wondered aloud. ‘If the ghost of Holmes has somehow come back, why is he here, and not in Baker Street? Here, is he . . . ?’

  ‘I called Ross and got her to take a look. He’s not back in Baker Street. And I suppose this is one of the locations featured in the stories, but not one where you’d think Holmes would be remembered. Unless there are a lot of people here who specifically expect him to be around, like with all those Losley ghosts that popped up everywhere.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And why communicate to some old lady who’s nothing to do with anything? I’m thinking maybe it’s about place and time. I’m going to go over there tomorrow morning and see if he shows up again.’

  Costain turned the book in his hands, looking at the four stick figures from every angle. ‘Stick figures, like on the blade. Like in that Holmes story.’

  ‘One of the figures performed live for the old lady is a bit like one of the ones from the blade, but the other three really aren’t. That one there – the third one, one arm up and the other diagonally down – that’s the flag semaphore letter “K”, but only because he’s got his legs together. In semaphore, only the arms matter, and he’s definitely doing things with his legs. That’s the only standard coded meaning I can find, and that’s pushing it.’

  ‘Ross’ll see something.’

  ‘Yeah. I hope.’ He found himself smiling. ‘You’re still so into her, aren’t you?’

  Costain looked suddenly vulnerable, almost angry, then visibly let it go. ‘She’s like the sun round my earth, mate. Still. She’s way over there, and she doesn’t care if she shines on me or not.’

  Sefton closed his hotel-room door behind him and called Joe, who was also away from home, at an academic conference in Oxford, where he said his major function was to stand behind his publisher’s stall and drink coffee while everyone else was in lectures. Sefton told him a few details about the case, thankful that Quill’s rules for their team allowed him to do so, asked his opinion about the stick men. Joe agreed with Costain that Ross would crack the code. ‘If you ever meet her,’ said Sefton, ‘she’s not going to live up to your expectations.’

  ‘I do see her basically as Wonder Woman,’ Joe agreed. Sefton told him he loved him and they said goodnight.

  Sefton tried to read on his phone before going to sleep in the too-tight sheets of the hotel bed. He was making his way through the later Holmes stories, wanting to keep a step ahead. There was a lot of weird stuff here. Having killed his hero and been forced by public opinion to bring him back, Conan Doyle seemed not to know what to do with him. The public wanted him to live, but his creator didn’t. Sefton’s last conscious thought was that the ‘ghost’ of Holmes must have been traumatized by that, all the time.

  In his dreams that night, Holmes came urgently to Sefton, tried to get a message through to him. There was a telegram, an urgent communication; he had to rip the envelope open, quickly; they may already be too late! But there was nothing inside the envelope. Something was hissing; an unignited gas flame bursting up angrily into Holmes’s study. Sefton tried to haul something over it, to put it out. There was a sudden pain in his left arm, a burn!

  The pain shoved him up out of his dreams. He flailed around the bed, his eyes opening, realizing there was a weight on his arm, something preventing him as he tried to thrash it away. The pain suddenly doubled into something he couldn’t deal with and he saw the thing he couldn’t get off his arm.

  A snake.

  Sefton leaped out of bed and realized he wasn’t going to make it to the phone. The pain was suddenly too big again, and it shoved itself up into his throat and head. He managed to yell. He fell and the darkness rushed in to take him.

  FOURTEEN

  Ross stood at the end of the bed, Costain beside her. He was looking as horrified and empty as she felt. In the bed lay Kevin Sefton, his face covered by an oxygen mask, his bandaged arm still in a splint and hooked up to an IV, his skin deathly pale. Ross had found the number for Joe in his phone. He was heading here, to Walton Community Hospital, five or six miles from the hotel where, hours before, Sefton had been attacked. Ross had taken a hire car out of London, before the trains started. They’d both tried to call Quill, but kept getting his voicemail.

  ‘I heard weird noises from his room next door,’ said Costain. ‘He was thrashing about; then he yelled, so I called back, got no answer,
ran down and got a key off the front desk.’ He sounded like he was making excuses, desperately trying to establish a credible cover story for this not being his fault. As if it could be. As if this was about him. ‘I found him lying on the carpet with the snake still on him. It had its mouth clamped onto him. The skin around its mouth . . . you don’t want to see. It had been chewing. They always say with a major injury don’t move them, so I didn’t. I wanted to kill the snake, but I thought, Shit, what if that makes it pump more venom into him? So I called 999 and they got there in less than five minutes. They were brilliant. They’d obviously talked to someone on the way over, and they took him and the snake both. I mean, these paramedics, they actually grabbed a snake.’

  Ross had seen the snake, still alive, in an empty fish tank in the paramedics’ office. An Indian cobra, she’d found out, by comparing it to pictures online. Of course, a small hospital like this didn’t have any antivenom. Some was being flown here from London, less than an hour, they said. ‘A neurotoxin that will often kill in a few minutes,’ she’d read online. The effect was something like a heart attack.

  The snake in the story had been a ‘swamp adder’, but there was no such animal. This speckled, dangerous species, native to India, was indeed, another search confirmed, what several people thought was the closest thing to the snake in the story.

  ‘Right,’ she said, determined to do something instead of just standing here. ‘We need to find that elderly woman Kev described to you. She set him up to “play the part of Sherlock Holmes” by making the same shapes himself. She must be in on it, one of our ever-increasing gang of suspects. If there was CCTV overlooking that park, we can confirm—’

  ‘There won’t be,’ said Costain. ‘This town doesn’t have much coverage.’

  ‘They couldn’t find a victim in this town, so they made one. Always the plan within a plan. We have a description, and indications of where this old woman could be found, assuming she was telling the truth. Which is bloody unlikely. Let’s get it out to the local uniforms.’

  They went to the hotel and found crime scene examiners working the room. There was no bell rope, of course, as there had been in the story, not that snakes could slide down them anyway, apparently. Nor could they be controlled, as the snake in the story was, by whistling. The bed could be moved, not having been bolted to the floor. The snake, it seemed, had actually been introduced through an air vent above the bed. The vent itself was too narrow for a person to fit into, but it led up to a between-floors space in which, crouching, someone could fit. Maybe that had been their short killer again.

  The examiners entered the gap through a floor panel that was loose under a rug on the floor above, having been already prised open, and found regular-sized shoe prints in the dust, a photo of which they sent to Ross. Glove marks, no fingerprints. The hotel CCTV did indeed show an old lady who matched the description Sefton had given, delicate lace gloves on her hands, show a surprising amount of sudden heft in heaving open the floor panel.

  ‘Who are these people?’ said Costain. ‘What sort of gang includes old ladies, American mercenaries, prisoners called Dean Michael and South Sea islanders of limited stature? Talk about positive discrimination.’

  ‘The snake will be rare in the UK,’ said Ross, ‘not something easily kept as a pet. I’ve put the word out to the reptile-owning community. Let’s see if anyone’s had one stolen.’

  ‘Can you fingerprint a snake?’ asked Costain.

  ‘We’ll bloody try,’ she said. She checked a message on her phone. ‘Lofthouse is coming down. They’ve stabilized Sefton, but it’s still touch and go.’

  ‘Great. If there’s nothing we can do for Sefton here, I did think . . . I mean, it’d just take an hour for us to get back into London . . .’

  He sounded like he thought she wouldn’t like what he was about to suggest. ‘What?’

  ‘Ballard’s deal hasn’t come through yet, but maybe he’d have access to something that could save Kev.’

  Ross nodded. ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘Wake up!’ someone was shouting in Sefton’s ear.

  He suddenly realized what had happened, thought he had the snake on him, leaped up.

  He was standing by a hospital bed, looking down at . . . himself.

  Shit. Was he dead?

  No, he could see himself breathing. He reached out a hand and it passed through his own neck, immaterial. He felt it, though. It was like a sudden cold in his throat. He moved his fingers, experimenting, letting his curiosity help him deal with the fear. Then he remembered that someone had spoken to him, and looked around. Gilbert Flamstead was standing nearby, arms folded, a grin on his face, watching him. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘that’s better. Good morning.’

  So was this also a dream with Holmes in it? No. Sefton knew the texture of dreams by now. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I am whoever you say I am.’

  ‘Yeah, no, enough of that bollocks – who actually are you?’

  ‘I’m Gilbert Flamstead, the actor. You may have seen me in such productions as Richard II for the Royal Shakespeare Company, a number of blockbuster superhero movies as the ever-so-charming British bad guy, in Nicholas Nickleby on Sky Arts and of course as the BBC’s current in-period but still rather funky Sherlock Holmes.’ He held up a palm before Sefton could reply. ‘No, really, I am actually him.’

  ‘Sorry. Gilbert Flamstead, the actor, is aware of me standing by my own body in some sort of near-death experience? Are you . . . what, someone who knows our side of the curtain?’ Sefton took an experimental step forwards and peered at Flamstead, who seemed delighted by the attention. ‘No, you’re more than that. I’ve had a bit of experience of you lot now. People who know this stuff are all a bit scared. You lot swan about like you own the place. You’re one of the . . . I don’t know what to call them, the great powers, like Brutus or the Rat King.’

  ‘The Gods of London, you mean?’

  ‘I think I’d like to be the judge of that.’

  Flamstead laughed. ‘In so many ways, you already are.’ He held out his hand for Sefton to shake. Sefton did so, a bit surprised there was something physical to grasp. ‘I’ve been around much longer than Gilbert Flamstead has. I’ve been called Puck, Mr Punch, Ally Sloper, the Artful Dodger. I was actually one of Lionel Bart’s drinking companions when he was composing Oliver! He nearly cast me, but I thought, Bit of a giveaway.’

  Sefton suddenly wondered if he should be shaking this hand. Flamstead laughed as he withdrew it. ‘Which of these gods are you, then? Are you the Trickster figure, like—?’

  ‘Spot on. You are learning. I’m the one who always finds the fun. I like pulling the carpet out from under. Everything I say is a lie. Oh, your face! Priceless! Actually, to be honest, I’ve got a bit bored of saying that now; it just sends people round and round in that ancient loop of logic. Everything I say in the real world to real people is a lie. It has to be. It’s just the way I’m made. So here, this not being the real world, you can genuinely trust what I’m telling you. I’ve discovered that in the real world, being British and sarcastic, I can actually get my meaning across enough to function by just saying the opposite of what I mean. That and I’ve trained a couple of expert posh-type to media-type translators.’

  ‘So when you say you are Gilbert Flamstead . . . ?’

  ‘I had myself incarnated. I decided, towards the end of what had been a terribly serious century, to see if I could have a bit more of a laugh by getting down and dirty with the flesh in the next one. Only to find . . .’ He spread his arms in mock despair. ‘What a ridiculous bloody audience. It’s all getting more serious by the day! What fools these mortals be. I wanted to see what it’s like from the other end. You see, when Londoners call on me, it’s because they’re fed up with how things are. They want improbable dramatic reversals. When reality isn’t good enough, they use me to fashion great myths.’

  ‘So you’re sort of . . . the software that gets things and people “remembered”?’

/>   Flamstead opened his mouth in theatrical shock. ‘I am not fucking “software”! Look at you, deciding who is and isn’t a person! Typical bloody human.’

  ‘OK, OK, so you’re a god who likes tricking people. Are you and the Rat King related?’ Sefton recalled that the God of London he’d met when he’d been searching for answers in the Ripper case had also had a poor opinion of humanity.

  ‘What?! Him with his “bring down the government” malarkey? Honestly, politics! I’m not pro or anti anything, except when it’s the right fashion to wear for a while. I’m just having fun. I suppose you could say he and I are all part of the same thing. You’ve probably decided he’s some sort of, I don’t know, computer virus or something.’

  Sefton looked back to his body on the bed. He felt now like he’d felt the last couple of times he’d ventured into the ‘outer boroughs’ where these ‘gods’ lived. That feeling was suppressing the panic that was threatening to well up inside him about the fact that, yeah, he’d actually been bitten by a snake, hadn’t he? Standing here right now, he felt like he wasn’t experiencing time properly. The quality of light was a bit askew, the dust unmoving in the air. It was as if Flamstead had halted everything at a particular moment. Which was probably a good thing, because . . .

  ‘You’re wondering if you’re about to die. Well, perhaps, if I don’t sort things around a bit, but me visiting you is nothing to do with that. Someone else handles death.’

  ‘London is all about the letter of the law, isn’t it?’ said Sefton. ‘Like it’s enough, for whatever’s going on here, that I “act” being Sherlock Holmes, just in terms of copying someone who was said to be him.’